Design System Designer (Independent)
Jan 2025 – Present
Tokens, components, patterns, layouts, copywriting and governance
To rebuild the design system as a scalable, consistent, and flexible foundation that enables product teams to work faster and more confidently.
Design systems are supposed to make teams faster, not slower. Yet our platform had ended up with two extremes that caused friction at every step:
Resources: flexible but chaotic. Designers and developers were creating hundreds of “snowflake” components. Consistency was impossible and features were built in isolation.
Blizzard: strict but rigid. Every small change required the design system team to implement them, creating a bottleneck and forcing teams to compromise on user experience.
The result? 880+ components with overlapping variants, inconsistent layouts across devices, and frustration for everyone from product managers to developers.
I led the effort to create Frostbite, a design system built not just for visual consistency, but to accelerate product teams, reduce cognitive load, and provide a foundation that could scale intentionally.
Teams were slowed down by both excess freedom and rigid governance.
Key issues:
- Component bloat: 880+ components, many with multiple sizing, alignment, and responsive options
- Inconsistent token usage: colors, typography, and spacing didn’t have semantic clarity
- Governance bottlenecks: small design changes required the design system team to implement them
- Inefficient handoff: unclear patterns led to duplicated work and increased technical debt
The design system wasn’t enabling product teams — it was constraining them. The challenge was not just visual design, it was process, governance, and scalability.
Frostbite transformed the way product teams work:
Faster feature delivery: Teams no longer hit bottlenecks for small changes
Consistency at scale: Components and patterns are predictable, reducing bugs and duplicated work
Reduced cognitive load: Designers can focus on solving user problems, not managing 880 variants
Improved collaboration: Developers and designers speak the same language with tokens, patterns, and
documentation
Scalable foundation: The system is built to grow intentionally, not accumulate snowflake components
Frostbite became the system teams could trust — enabling creativity without chaos.
Instead of incremental fixes, I approached Frostbite as a full reset of the system foundation, balancing flexibility and control while keeping the end goal in mind: teams that can ship confidently and consistently.
I reviewed every component, variant, and token. Components that didn’t have a clear purpose were removed. This reduced cognitive load for designers and confusion for developers.
Rather than creating multiple versions for every device, components were designed to work first on mobile, then scaled only when necessary.
Introduced meaningful design tokens that describe purpose, not just style. This allowed teams to make updates confidently and consistently across products.
Moved away from a centralized bottleneck model, giving product teams autonomy while maintaining system consistency.
Established a three-tier system:
components → content patterns → layouts → UI patterns.
Teams could now quickly assemble complex pages without reinventing the wheel.
Too much freedom leads to chaos; too much control leads to friction. Find the middle ground.
Visual design alone doesn’t fix systemic issues. Governance, tokens, and patterns are just as important.
Empower product teams while giving them guardrails to maintain consistency.
If you like what you see and want to work together, get in touch!
