Design Systems
Design systems fail when they optimize for component creation instead of systematic prevention. I evolved ConstructConnect's design system across two phases:
- Foundation work established organizational architecture: migrating from Adobe XD to Figma with Atomic Design methodology, setting up variable infrastructure for tokenization, and organizing components to enable future theming capabilities.
- Transformation work introduced AI-assisted workflows that reduced design-to-development effort 64%. The work achieved 98% consistency, 95% component coverage with 25-30 composable patterns, and WCAG compliance checking before code review. Each iteration started as 'where will this break?' and became systematic prevention.
Establishing ConstructConnect's design system architecture from organic growth to systematic foundation—pushing for Atomic Design principles and semantic token structure that enables scalable product development.
- Built AI-assisted component analysis workflow reducing manual token extraction by 64%
- Organized 200+ design tokens into three-tier W3C-compliant semantic architecture
- Established automated validation workflows preventing incomplete developer handoffs
Read more about establishing the design system foundationBuilding the bridge from design to development—creating systematic workflows that transform Figma specifications into production-ready code tokens while solving architectural gaps in the tooling itself.
- Working around Figma's motion token limitation by creating dedicated variables file for VS Code integration
- Established automated state validation system ensuring WCAG-compliant focus states
- Built developer handoff process delivering complete, validated token sets ready for implementation
Read more about the design-to-code transformation
