A design system the next tools can read
A sprawling Figma workspace with no single source of truth. Three team members who had never worked together. Half a day a week to fix it.
Company and product anonymised to protect confidentiality. Design decisions and visual assets reflect work done in role.
The job wasn't just to clean it up
A sprawling Figma workspace with no single source of truth. Three team members who had never worked together. A design library touched by multiple designers over time with no single owner. Half a day a week to fix it. The job wasn't just to clean it up. It was to build something the whole team and the AI tools coming next could rely on. That required a roadmap before a single token was touched.
Start with a roadmap, not a fix
The first decision was to resist the urge to start fixing immediately. Without understanding the full scope, any fix would be local and temporary. A full design system roadmap was defined first, from synthesising existing work through to governance, giving the team a shared picture of where the system needed to go and in what order.
The audit
Interface inventory. Gap analysis. A sprawling workspace, 20 hours, three categories of findings: redundant components, components needing updates, and components that should have been variants. The token naming convention, color-text-secondary-disabled, was chosen with the frontend developer for continuity and machine readability. Both engineers and AI tooling can parse it without ambiguity. The architecture moved from styles to variables, making tokens readable by Figma MCP, Claude Code, and Figma Make. 86% of tokens reached consistency between Figma and Storybook. The component layer remains in progress.
System foundations
The file architecture was planned for scale: Foundations, Components, and Patterns as separate concerns, each publishable as a library to feature files. Voice guidelines were aligned with the existing marketing design system for cross-surface consistency. Design principles and a shared glossary were initiated, work that was later deprioritised as the team and roadmap evolved.
A system the next generation of tools can read
A components.md file was created as a structured reference, readable by Claude Code and compatible with Figma Make. The architecture is in place. The pipeline between design system and AI-assisted production is being built in the open.
What was built in half a day a week
Half a day a week. That was the constraint. In that time: a full roadmap, a token architecture at 86% consistency between Figma and Storybook, and a pipeline between design and AI-assisted production that didn't exist before. The system is not finished. But it has a direction, and the next designer who touches it will know exactly where they are.