Design systems
Enterprise Design System
I led the design of an enterprise design system built for six companies in insurance and adopted by all six: shared components, tokens and brand themes, kept alive through monthly feedback and maintenance.
Outcome
Grew adoption of the library from one company to six, speeding up design delivery for internal applications, portal redesigns and various marketing content.
- Role:
- Lead designer
- Team:
- Design and engineering teams across six companies
- My contribution:
- Creation, evolution and maintenance of the system: components, tokens, brand themes, Figma configuration and the shared library
- Timeline:
- 2026
- Platform:
- Enterprise web: Figma, Angular, Storybook, Token Studio and GitHub Copilot
Proprietary work, shown in generalized form
This case study covers proprietary, employer-owned work. Visuals have been recreated and stripped of logos, branding and internal data to protect confidentiality, so only a limited selection of examples can be shared. Full workflows and detailed walkthroughs are available in conversation.
- companies use it, grown from one
- 6companies use it, grown from one
- components, each with states, usage guidance and a live playground
- 80components, each with states, usage guidance and a live playground
- company themes, each in light and dark, from one token set
- 5company themes, each in light and dark, from one token set
- design tokens for color, type, spacing, radius, shadow and motion
- 100+design tokens for color, type, spacing, radius, shadow and motion
The problem
Existing guidance was a brand guide, not a build kit. Designers at six companies kept solving the same interface problems from scratch, each with its own identity, tools and habits, so reuse was hard and quality drifted. I set out to give them shared foundations that still let every company look like itself.
My approach
- Separated shared structure from brand expression. One set of components and tokens, styled per company with its own colors, logos, properties and some content. The trade-off: the structure had to leave room for distinct brands. In return I could adapt an experience for another company within the same sprint without rebuilding its foundations.
- Made complexity configurable. A responsive table with configurable rows, columns and nested variants meant nobody redrew a table for each screen.
- Built the shell myself. With limited engineering support, I designed and built my own shell for the design system, gathering everything I had in Figma into a form teams could actually use. That gave me a working foundation to collaborate with engineers on other teams on the codebase, and I led into design engineering to get a Storybook instance connected.
- Treated adoption as ongoing work. Default design files shipped with library access. Monthly meetings introduced additions, with worked examples. I folded feedback into monthly maintenance, required a strong use case before adding a shared component, and kept current-state and future-state projects separate so experiments did not harden into patterns. I also expanded the color scales, checked contrast, and led the move to Figma Enterprise.
Design outcome
I took an existing brand guide and grew it into a full design system across components, resources, tokens and library integrations such as Font Awesome. It significantly improved design speed for designers across business units, and it is now central to all design work.
Adoption grew from one company to all six. At least ten colleagues across creative disciplines use it day to day and report faster work, better design quality and consistency, and less manual work. The other two companies had no single-color theme to build on, or were acquired later.
Next time I would set up measurement on day one, with library analytics and time to first draft.
One set of tokens and components lets every company’s product look like itself without rebuilding the interface for each brand.
I built and maintain this design system as the shared foundation for products across several companies. It has 80 components and 7 patterns across 5 company themes, each in light and dark, with tokens in CSS, JSON and SCSS and a WCAG 2.2 AA target. The docs site, Figma library and Storybook keep designers and developers working from the same source.
Feature notes
CurrentA team shipping across several brands usually has to choose between rebuilding the same component for each one or letting each product drift apart. This system makes brand a setting, so the interface is built once and themed per company. Designers, developers and AI tools all start from the same components and tokens, so a change is made once and documented once.