A type scale with only five sizes
When we audit an existing product, the first thing we do is count font sizes. Fourteen is common; we once found twenty-three. Each one was added for a good local reason, and together they make every screen feel slightly noisy.
Five sizes covers almost everything: caption, body, lead, heading and display. With so few steps, hierarchy has to come from weight, colour and space instead. That turns out to be calmer, and it survives translation — German headings that wrap onto three lines still read as headings.
The hard part is not choosing the sizes but deleting the old ones. We keep a short migration table in the design system docs and remove one legacy size per sprint until none are left.