Before I worked on the web, I designed buildings. And one thing architecture teaches you very quickly is that consistency isn’t boring — it’s the foundation of good design.

In architecture, you work with grids, material palettes, and proportional systems. A window detail established on the ground floor carries through to the fifth. The handrail in the stairwell matches the one on the balcony. These aren’t arbitrary constraints — they’re what make a building feel coherent, considered, and intentional.

Design systems on the web work the same way. A set of typography scales, colour tokens, spacing units, and component patterns that repeat predictably across an entire site. When done well, they make the design feel solid — like everything belongs together.

The buildings I admired most weren’t the ones with the flashiest materials. They were the ones where every decision felt connected. The same is true of great websites.