You’re not designing sites: you’re designing systems

Designing for reuse and consistency requires rethinking the way designers work: designers need to think globally and design locally. That is, while designing specific sites and/or features, we have to understand how what we create partakes in the design system as a whole. Does it leverage the core principles? Does it support or contradict a pattern used in another section of the site or of the product suite? Could another established component be used or extended to meet the local need? It takes a certain type of designer who has equally strong left- and right-brain skills to do this: these are the designers with whom I want to work.