DESIGN SYSTEMS THAT SPEAK CODE
Design Systems | Design-Dev Collaboration | Scalable Design | Brand Consistency
OVERVIEW
My role: Product Designer
Timeline: 3 weeks
The mission: Stop the design-dev telephone game
THE PROBLEM
​Multiple platforms.
Zero consistency.
Designers recreating components.
Developers guessing specs.
Everyone frustrated!!
WHAT I DID
Built a unified design system by collaborating with Figma Make:
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Learned their token architecture approach (colors, type, spacing that cascade)
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Adopted component variants strategy (not separate files for every state)
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Applied their documentation framework to real B2C + B2B contexts
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Created developer-ready specs embedded in files
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Made documentation that actually lives with the design
Translation: Took Figma Make's best practices and made them work for actual dev handoff.
DESIGN SYSTEM ELEMENTS
All the components, all the documentation, zero guesswork:
Typography
Color Palette
Alerts & Notifications
Buttons
Shadow Effects
Cards
Inputs
Grid
Badges
Dashboard - Table
THE IMPACT
Before: "What's the padding on this button again?"
After: Production-ready specs, every time.
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Outcomes:
Handoff time ---> dramatically reduced
Brand consistency ---> actually achieved
Design efficiency ---> way up
Developer confidence ---> restored
Ship speed ---> faster
TAKEAWAY
Good design systems aren't just pretty component libraries, they're the bridge between design intent and what actually ships.
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This one eliminated the guesswork by learning from Figma Make's framework and translating it into something developers could actually use.
WANT TO GO DEEPER?
I wrote about automating design systems with LLMs on Medium, exploring how AI can help generate tokens, documentation, and component specs faster.
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