Creating Scalable Design Systems
Building versatile multi-brand design systems that go beyond light and dark modes, empowering diverse creative directions while streamlining workflows through automation and tight cross-team collaboration.
My interest in design systems began around 2017, sparked by a workshop on multi-brand theming with developers. It revealed how systems thinking could transform collaboration, streamline the design-to-development workflow, and enable the creation of custom interfaces for multiple clients from a single foundation.
At the same time, our projects were growing more complex, and the industry was clearly shifting toward design systems as a foundational practice. Curiosity, project needs, and industry momentum aligned, setting me on a path that’s since become a core part of my design leadership.
I’ve since built and scaled systems across very different products, from PleaseFix, a SaaS bug reporting tool, to the Star Citizen platform, where I now co-manage the design team.
PleaseFix: Learning by Doing (and Failing)
Where it Started
Our first design system for PleaseFix was designed in Sketch and helped us launch a functional MVP. While the initial version served its purpose, it lacked the structure and scalability we needed: documentation was thin, collaboration with developers wasn’t formalized, and the component library was inconsistent.
When Ubisoft became our second client, the cracks became obvious. Adapting the interface to their branding took weeks, involved manual overrides, and introduced considerable tech debt, highlighting the need for a more flexible and robust system.
Rebuilding for Scale
We used our transition to Figma as an opportunity to rebuild our design system from the ground up:
Defined a scalable token architecture: global, semantic, and component-level
Improved accessibility to meet WCAG AA standards
Rebuilt the entire component library for reuse and adaptability
Connected design and development through shared documentation in Figma and Storybook
After a few months of focused work, we simulated a new client onboarding and delivered a fully branded theme in hours instead of weeks. It marked the successful launch of our new default theme and proved our system was now ready to scale.
Leveraging a Multi-brand Design System
To match our SaaS model, we designed a system that could adapt to both lightweight and fully customized client needs. Using semantic and component-specific tokens, we could:
Quickly create a new theme by changing just a few values for smaller clients
Provide premium clients with full branding integration, without custom overrides or added debt
Improving Cross-Disciplinary Collaboration
The real breakthrough came when we embedded the design system into our broader workflow. I introduced recurring Technical Analysis Workshops to align designers, developers, and stakeholders around Design System updates and upcoming feature needs. Every design decision became an opportunity to reinforce and extend our component and tokens library, not bypass it.
Scaling to the Star Citizen Platform
At Cloud Imperium Games, I now co-lead the design side of our platform Design System work for the Star Citizen universe. The scale is larger, the visual language more ambitious, and the component needs far more diverse.
📂 We structured our system into two parallel tracks:
Orion – Our core system powering product features across the site: forums, launcher, commerce, settings, and more. Functional, cohesive, and extensible.
Artemis – A marketing-focused system built for expressive branding. Supports 20+ in-game brands through flexible theming, all tied into our custom CMS.
