This article was based on the interview with Nigel Dennis, Creative Director at The Office of Experience by Greg Kihlström, AI and MarTech keynote speaker for The Agile Brand with Greg Kihlström podcast. Listen to the original episode here:
As enterprise marketing leaders, we’ve all invested heavily in systems and processes designed to bring order to the chaos. Chief among them is the design system—that hallowed repository of components, guidelines, and rules meant to ensure brand consistency and accelerate development. It was sold to us as a single source of truth, an engine of efficiency. But what if that very engine has seized?
For many organizations, the design system has become a gilded cage—a beautifully crafted set of constraints that now stifles innovation, slows down digital transformation, and creates more friction than it removes. It’s the digital equivalent of paving a cow path; it makes the existing route smoother but does little to help you get to a new destination faster.
The fundamental issue is that most design systems were built on a flawed premise. They were conceived as static rulebooks, digital extensions of a print-era brand guide, rather than living, breathing frameworks for growth. To unlock the true potential of a design system, we need to move beyond thinking of it as a library of assets and start seeing it as a catalyst for cultural change, cross-functional collaboration, and tangible business outcomes. This requires a few critical mental shifts, a more intelligent foundation, and a new way of measuring success. It’s not about throwing out the system you have; it’s about evolving it from a book of laws into a shared language for innovation.
The Flawed Foundation: Moving Beyond the Afterthought
The root of the problem often lies at the very beginning. The design system is frequently treated as an output of a branding exercise, not as a foundational strategic tool in its own right. It becomes a collection of digital artifacts—colors, fonts, logos—without a deeper, more flexible logic built in. Nigel Dennis points out that this approach is shortsighted and fails to account for the one constant in business: change.
“We kind of look at a design system as an extraction or kind of an expansion on existing brand guidelines. The irony is that sometimes in most brand guidelines, the digital guidelines or digital parts of those brand guidelines are an afterthought. And sometimes we kind of accept that afterthought and kind of paint by numbers… Those things are possible, but we’ve got to think about them a little bit differently and be flexible and really build those foundations out to be more meaningful than they really are right now.”
When the digital expression of your brand is an “afterthought,” the resulting system is inherently brittle. It can’t scale to accommodate new products, support different business verticals, or adapt to a rebrand without a massive, time-consuming overhaul. The hidden costs are staggering: developers spend countless hours building one-off components, designers are kneecapped by rigid templates, and speed to market slows to a crawl. The solution is to stop “painting by numbers” and start building an intelligent foundation from the outset—one that is designed for flexibility and scale, not just for enforcing the brand standards of today.
The Great Enabler: Forging a Shared Vision Between Design and Engineering
A truly effective design system is not a document that gets handed off from one team to another. It is a living artifact co-owned by design and engineering, built on a foundation of mutual understanding and empathy. The classic trope of designers throwing “finished” work over the wall to engineers who then complain about feasibility is a recipe for mediocrity and delay. The mental shift required is moving from constraint to enablement, which begins with fostering a shared vision.
“I think it is a big glaring gap in a lot of teams and internal at agency level. There is a lack of vision that can really get in the way in that shared vision, understanding what we’re all building, what we’re working against, and having that shared vision for the work is really the key… in the same way we created writer and designer partnerships, you know, back in the day, traditional agency model, we need to be doing the same with engineers and as creatives kind of reaching across the aisle, making sure that we have that shared vision.”
This isn’t about forcing designers to code or engineers to become UX experts. It’s about creating a common language and a shared understanding of intent. When an engineer understands why a particular interaction is designed the way it is—the user goal it’s trying to achieve—they can build a more robust and elegant solution. Likewise, when a designer understands the technical constraints or possibilities, they can design solutions that are not only beautiful and user-friendly but also feasible and scalable. As leaders, our role is to break down these silos and create the conditions for this partnership to thrive, transforming the design system from a point of friction into a platform for collaboration.
The Technical Underpinning: Intelligent Foundations and Tokenization
This all sounds good in theory, but how do you actually build a system that is both consistent and flexible? The answer lies in moving beyond simple style guides to a more sophisticated, token-based architecture. Tokenization is the practice of abstracting design properties—like colors, fonts, and spacing—into agnostic “tokens” that can be applied system-wide. This creates multiple layers of logic, from primitive values to semantic applications, which is where the real magic happens.
“My brand color changes from red to blue one day… I’m only changing that in one place. And the second I change that one place, it cascades everywhere else I’ve applied it. So it sounds like a very simple concept and it’s not a novel one… what we’ve encouraged our team at OX to do is build those intelligent foundations early. We are better designers when we work with a set of rules early.”
This is the linchpin of a modern design system. Imagine your primary brand color is red. In a traditional system, that specific hex code for red is hard-coded into every button, link, and headline. If you rebrand to blue, you face a monumental task of hunting down and replacing every instance. With a tokenized system, you have a primitive token for “Brand-Red-500” and a semantic token called “Color-Action-Primary” that points to it. All buttons use the semantic token. When you rebrand, you simply update the “Color-Action-Primary” token to point to a new “Brand-Blue-500” primitive. The change propagates across your entire digital ecosystem instantly. This approach de-risks future changes, creates exponential efficiency, and, perhaps counterintuitively, fosters more creativity by allowing teams to focus on solving user problems instead of wrestling with foundational elements.
Measuring What Matters: From Adoption Rates to Business Velocity
For too long, the success of a design system has been measured with vanity metrics like component adoption rates or pixel-perfect brand consistency. While not unimportant, these metrics fail to capture the real business impact. A modern, enabling design system should be measured by its ability to accelerate business outcomes. The key performance indicator isn’t just consistency; it’s velocity.
“Ultimately, the biggest benefit to this is speed to market is obviously the biggest impact point. Your team coming up with a new feature is no longer hindered or they’re no longer kneecapped by not having the flexibility of a design system to support that… You’re creating a living, breathing digital articulation of what your brand guidelines always should have been in practice.”
When a product team wants to launch a new feature, how quickly can they do it? When the business decides to enter a new market, can the existing digital framework support it without a complete rebuild? When a new designer joins the team, how long does it take for them to become productive? These are the questions that reveal the true ROI of your design system. A successful system reduces onboarding time from weeks to days, allows for rapid prototyping and testing of new ideas, and gives the organization the agility to outmaneuver competitors who are stuck with a more rigid, legacy approach.
The conversation around design systems needs to be elevated from the design studio to the boardroom. It’s time to stop seeing them as a cost center for maintaining brand standards and start treating them as a strategic asset for driving growth and innovation. This requires a deliberate shift in mindset, moving away from rigid enforcement and toward flexible enablement. It means building systems on an intelligent, tokenized foundation that anticipates change rather than resisting it. It demands that we foster a culture of deep collaboration between design and engineering, built upon a shared vision and mutual respect.
As leaders, our task is to champion this evolution. We must ask the hard questions about whether our current systems are accelerating our business or holding it back. The future belongs to organizations that can build, test, and innovate at scale without being crushed by the weight of their own complexity. A well-architected design system is no longer just a nice-to-have; it is the foundational framework for digital agility and a critical component of any modern marketing technology stack. The “living, breathing digital articulation” of your brand is waiting to be built.
