Design systems are killing internal communication
Design systems were supposed to bring consistency and polish to our digital products. And to be fair, they did. For external-facing assets — apps, websites, customer portals — they’ve largely delivered. But somewhere along the way, that same obsession with harmony and hierarchy bled into internal communication. And that’s where it all went sideways.
Because the more we standardized our slides, emails, docs, and dashboards, the more we sterilized our message. We started prioritizing consistency over urgency. Layout over clarity. Typography over tone.
And now? Nobody’s reading the damn message.
How we got from signal to noise
Look around your org’s internal updates. You’ll find Slack posts templated like social media banners. All-hands decks that read like marketing campaigns. Memos that took three days to Figma-ify and still say nothing.
It’s not just annoying — it’s dangerous.
The tools that were supposed to bring discipline to product design are now being wielded as blunt instruments inside the organization. Every update passes through a mini production pipeline: write, design, approve, revise, design again, send. The result is a clean, beautiful, and completely ignorable wall of content.
Design systems were never meant to replace judgment. But that’s exactly what’s happened. Instead of asking, what’s the clearest way to say this?, teams now ask, does this follow the system? That’s how you get onboarding docs that look like brand style guides and security warnings formatted like blog posts.
When everything looks like marketing, nothing feels urgent
You know the tone. “We’re excited to share an update!” It’s usually followed by 500 words of corporate hedge-speak wrapped in soft gradients and tasteful spacing. By the time you realize it’s announcing a reorg or vendor shutdown, you’re two paragraphs in and already mentally checked out.
The problem isn’t just tone — it’s design-induced apathy.
When every internal message resembles an external one, employees learn to treat them the same way: skim, ignore, or delete. A culture of high polish creates the illusion of communication without the reality of comprehension. We’ve trained our people to tune it all out.
And the irony? The teams shipping these messages think they’re being clear. “It’s in the update.” “Didn’t you see the deck?” “We sent the comms last week.”
No, you sent a JPEG with text in it. Or a Notion page styled like a microsite. Or a Slack post buried under three emojis and a header image.
Design systems made things legible but not readable
There’s a difference between visual consistency and communicative clarity. The former helps when you’re navigating a UI. The latter helps when you’re trying to understand what the hell is happening in your job.
But when the same rules are applied across all comms — regardless of content, audience, or context — you end up with uniformity at the cost of meaning.
Everything starts looking the same. Launch announcements. Layoff notices. “Fun” Friday updates. Same font, same spacing, same voice. And when everything looks the same, nothing sticks.
It’s a kind of design monoculture. Safe. Familiar. Bland. The medium swallows the message.
We’ve mistaken alignment for effectiveness
Ask the average internal comms team about their goals, and you’ll hear words like “alignment” and “consistency.” But rarely “urgency” or “comprehension.”
Alignment isn’t the goal. Action is.
And yet, we’ve built processes that value approval over clarity. You can’t post a one-sentence heads-up anymore — it has to go through brand review, comms review, maybe even legal. By the time it hits inboxes, the moment’s already passed. The message lands with all the force of a scheduled LinkedIn post.
This isn’t just a design issue — it’s a trust issue. When leaders over-design their comms, they’re signaling that the appearance of alignment matters more than actual understanding. And employees can smell the disconnect. That’s why they forward the raw memo instead of the pretty PDF. That’s why teams build rogue Google Docs with real instructions instead of using the internal wiki. That’s why urgent updates end up as Slack DMs instead of broadcast posts.
People still want clarity. They’re just not finding it in the “official” channels anymore.
What clear communication actually looks like
Sometimes, the best internal message is ugly.
A plaintext Slack post. A one-liner in red font. A headline with no intro, no filler, no applause.
Clear beats clever. Urgent beats on-brand. Useful beats polished.
This doesn’t mean abandoning design systems — it means putting them back in their lane. Let them support the message, not smother it. Let internal teams break the system when urgency calls for it. Let Slack be messy when it needs to be fast. Not every update needs to be “designed.” Some just need to land.
Until we fix this, the only people truly aligned are the ones ignoring it all
We need to stop pretending that good design automatically equals good communication. We’ve outsourced our voice to templates. We’ve replaced urgency with branding. We’ve confused style with signal.
It’s time to reclaim the messy, blunt, human clarity that actually drives action. Not every update needs a Figma file. Some just need to be read.
Will Kelly is a writer, content strategist, and keen observer of the IT industry. Medium is home to his personal writing projects. His professional interests include generative AI, cloud computing, DevOps, and collaboration tools. He has written for startups, Fortune 1000 firms, and leading industry publications, including CIO and TechTarget. Follow him on X: @willkelly. You can also follow him on BlueSky: willkelly.bsky.social.
