Conceptual Integrity is the principle that anywhere you look in your system, you can tell that the design is part of the same overall design. This includes low-level issues such as formatting and identifier naming, but also issues such as how modules and classes are designed, etc.

While developers focus a lot on High Cohesion and Low Coupling, they seem to underestimate the importance of Conceptual Integrity. Some times despite the high cohesion and low coupling, the system might not have conceptual integrity. This is because the overall style, themes, mood, does not tie it all together.
For example according to the Pragmatic Programmer, in computer languages, Smalltalk has conceptual integrity, so does Ruby, so does C. C++ doesn’t: it tries to be too many things at once, so you get an awkward marriage of concepts that don’t really fit together well.

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