A catalog is not a taste

Every company spent a year naming its grays. The result was a catalog. Catalogs are useful. They are not the same thing as a shared taste.

A library of buttons is not a system. A system is an agreement about what you will not redraw, and about what you will let stay particular.

Smaller than the pitch

The systems that stuck were smaller than the pitch. Color, type, space, and a handful of components that appear on every screen.

Everything else was allowed to be specific. The gold rush wanted a component for every mood. The pages that still look like themselves refused most of them.

Retire one

If your system document is longer than your product, you are maintaining a second product. The second product does not ship.

Retire a component this week and see if anyone writes to you. Silence is a kind of approval. The system gets quieter, and the product gets easier to see.