Design Systems Over Pages

“We’re not designing pages, we’re designing systems of components.”

• Stephen Hay

This reframing changes everything about how design work is scoped, structured, and evaluated. Pages are outputs. Systems are what you’re actually building.

A page-first mindset leads to repetition, inconsistency, and fragile designs that break when content changes. A system-first mindset leads to reusable patterns, predictable behavior, and designs that accommodate variation gracefully.

The shift isn’t just terminological, it changes what deliverables look like, how teams collaborate, and how success is measured.

Related: 02-atom—page-metaphor-problem, 01-molecule—atomic-design-methodology, 02-molecule—pattern-libraries-shared-vocabulary