Scale your product without losing coherence
From single-team simplicity to multi-platform consistency.
What is a Design System?
A collection of reusable components, guidelines, and standards that ensure visual and functional consistency across all digital products.
Components
Reusable building blocks that work the same everywhere. Buttons, forms, cards — built once, used everywhere.
Guidelines
Patterns and standards that define how things should look and behave unifing all spacings, colors and interactions.
Single Source
One truth for designers, developers, and product teams. No more 'which version is correct?'
The Scaling Problem
When a single team builds a single product, consistency comes naturally. But as organizations grow, complexity multiplies.
Natural consistency
What Goes Wrong
Cross-Entity Dependencies
When the mobile team needs a component the web team hasn't built yet, work gets blocked. Priorities clash. Progress slows.
UI/UX Drift
Visual consistency erodes. Interaction patterns diverge. What started as the same button looks and behaves differently everywhere.
Coordination Overhead
Every new component becomes a cross-team negotiation. Simple features require synchronization meetings, resulting in more coordinating than creating.
Two Paths Forward
The technology choice depends on your organization's tech landscape.
Single Framework
- Everyone uses React (or Vue, Angular, etc.)
- Share components via NPM packages
- Simpler tooling and documentation
- Faster development within the ecosystem
Multiple Frameworks
- Different teams use different frameworks
- Webcomponents for cross-framework compatibility
- More complex build and distribution
- Framework-agnostic, future-proof approach
Technology alone is not enough. A Design System requires governance, documentation, and processes that ensure components are built once, maintained centrally, and adopted consistently.
It requires investment in tooling and infrastructure. Most importantly, it requires organizational commitment to treating shared design as a product in itself.
How I Work
Every organization is different. The approach adapts to your reality.
Before any code is written, I map your organization's structure, platforms, and tech stacks to understand who builds what and identify the people most likely to own the design system.
Ownership typically falls into one of two models—either internal open source, which requires experienced contributors distributed across teams, or a dedicated team that takes full responsibility. Either way, the core group will need UI/UX expertise, serious engineering skills, and someone who can handle stakeholder management, whether that means triaging bug tickets or being the go-to person when teams need something new in the system.
Once the right people are identified, I help them build the technical skills their distribution model demands.
Shipping an NPM package requires different expertise than serving web components with manually maintained type definitions, and both come with their own challenges around versioning, documentation, backwards compatibility, and developer experience. These skills are learnable, but they're often overlooked because most developers have never had to think about providing a library rather than just consuming one.
Finally, teams need to learn how to actually use the system rather than just knowing it exists.
The design system needs to be embedded into the organization through clear processes, recurring knowledge-sharing sessions, and hands-on training. Most importantly, maintainers need to be empowered to call out UI/UX inconsistencies and deviations from established patterns—a design system without the authority to maintain coherence is just a component library that nobody uses correctly.
Need help building a Design System?
From component architecture to governance processes — I help organizations scale their products coherently.
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