Somewhere in the last few years we stopped designing pages, and I am not sure the field has fully reckoned with what that means.
We design components now. A card, a button, a form field, a header. Each one defined once, with its states and its variants, and then assembled into pages almost as an afterthought. The page has gone from being the unit of design to being the by-product of it.
The gain is real, and I will not pretend otherwise. Consistency, at scale, without heroics. A change made once and carried everywhere. A team of twenty people producing work that looks like it came from one hand. I have built enough of these systems to know what that is worth.
But something is lost, and it took me a while to name it. A page used to be a composition. It had a rhythm, a top and a bottom, an argument that unfolded. You designed the whole of it, and the parts served the whole.
Now the parts arrive first, and the page is what happens when you stack them. A stack of individually good components is not the same thing as a composition, any more than a pile of good sentences is an essay. Nobody is minding the whole.
So I have started making myself go back. Design the composition first, on paper if I have to, and let the components serve it. The system is meant to be a servant. When it starts deciding the shape of the argument, something has gone quietly backwards.