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Since 2022, I’ve built design systems of all scales and sizes for Salesforce, React, Angular, Vue, and briefly for iOS — across a wide range of web, tablet, and mobile applications. Here’s a little BTS sneak peek into the style guides I have built over the years.

I’ve built multiple design systems over the last 3 years, including multi-product design systems each used across 30-40 products for Forbes 50 firms. Here’s one thing I do differently that consistently increases product shipping speed and reduces design ops maintenance time (also why I get hired 👀). When I’m building a design system, I don’t start with UI. Because for design systems, I firmly believe: Dev limits + UX patterns >> UI design. A team building a conversational AI tool thinks about patterns very differently from one designing a supply chain analytics dashboard or a GenAI-driven content generation platform. So instead of asking, “What components do we have or need to build?” I ask, “How do these systems work on their own and how do they work together?” Here's what I do: 1. Flows - I do a workflow audit and map UX flows by studying internal portals and key third-party tools. Identify common flows such as onboarding, search, form-filling, etc. 2. Patterns - Extract UX patterns for each flow, based on usability priorities. 3. Components - Prioritize components by frequency of use and the importance of their role in UX. Only once flows + patterns are mapped do components start to make sense. Because they’re not static UI pieces — they’re living patterns that scale across ecosystems. And when building design systems, the goal isn’t to cover everything from day one. It’s to ensure 60 to 70 percent of the most-used patterns are already covered. That’s what helps teams build faster, smarter, and with fewer surprises down the line. Flows & Patterns > Components. Always.

This post brought in a lot of questions about how I build color styles and tokens for design systems. When designing them, I focus on scale and ease of shipping — for both design and dev teams. While the token set might look large in these images, it’s really just the same core color variables reused smartly across different contexts. This helps teams move faster without constantly referencing design system docs while they're designing and get distracted. The goal is twofold: 1/ Make it simple enough that new designers, PMs, or devs can make small updates even without design support or refering to docs. 2/ Ensure there's a strong color consistency in prod environment, so no one in the dev team ships slightly different tones by mistake when they have to ship features in tight time contraints.

Modals for Enterprise Products

Some Analytics components for an enterprise product.

I thought August & September were wild — but October tops it all. Since starting Insight in late September, things have only gotten more hectic. I’ve also become much clearer about what I take on and who I work with. Wrapped up most of my ghost design website projects for solo designers and agencies — now saying yes only where my strengths fit and with people I enjoy working with. My Figma files, product design case studies and email funnels outperform my portfolio website in closing leads, so from November it's all about sharpening that and owning my work — especially on the website design side. For product design, since I work in highly regulated and IP-rich industries, I am okay with having work under NDA completely, because I can always take care of case studies. Here are some favorite highlights from October.

Some Analytics components for an enterprise product.

Building step-by-step flow experiences for any GenAI tool website doesn’t have to be complex. It can be fun and easy to grasp too!