THE CHALLENGE
Product type
Design system Web design
Team
SOFTWARE AND TOOLS
Timeline
6 months (Feb–July 2026)
FRAMING THE PROBLEM
A fragmented brand growing faster than its system.
SD Worx is one of Europe’s leading providers of HR digital services, scaling rapidly across products, regions, and teams. That growth created a familiar tension: product and marketing were drifting apart visually, verbally, and operationally. Teams were working in silos, making the codebase harder to maintain and creating a disconnect between how designers designed and how developers built. With different teams solving the same problems in different ways, it became harder for the organisation to align on what both sides needed.
Brand asset and art direction
Understanding the current system
The system existed. The consistency didn't.
Instead of immediately creating new components, we audited how the existing system behaved across Figma, products and code.
We looked at four things:
Area
What we checked
What we were looking for
Foundations
Colour, typography, spacing, icons
Duplicate values, inconsistent naming, hardcoded styles
Components
Duplicates, variants, missing states, inconsistent behaviour
Usage
Real product screens
Detached components, overrides, one-off patterns
Design → code
Figma vs Storybook/code
Components that existed in one world but not the other
The design direction
Three pillars, one foundation.
Brand consistency
A unified visual and verbal system applied across 120+ products and 28 European markets.
Central documentation
A single source of truth for product, marketing, and brand — replacing scattered files, decks, and tribal knowledge.
Component management
A leaner, smarter component library with clear ownership, lifecycle, code connected system and contribution rules.
Components from the revamped system
What changed
The design system isn't a deliverable, it's a multiplier. Its value only becomes visible when product teams ship faster, brand teams stay consistent, and users feel the cohesion. Three cases below show how the foundation translated into measurable product outcomes across very different parts of the business.
40%+
Teams transitioned to the AI-assisted workflow
120+
Products and apps adopted the system
50%
Reduction in components (150 → 75)
28
European countries unified under one design language
Learning
Balancing expression and AI functionality.
I've learnt that design systems live at the intersection of brand expression, usability, and AI functionality. Components need to feel unmistakably on-brand while remaining flexible and reliable across different products. The challenge is finding the balance between consistency, distinctiveness, and what AI can help us automate.
Designing, thinking and researching across scale.
Working on a design system taught me to move constantly between the details and the bigger picture. From a tiny spacing decision to an entire product ecosystem.
Context is a budget
While AI can speed things up, I quickly realised that it comes at a cost. The approach is to be intentional about where AI adds real value and where a manual approach is simply more efficient. By reusing context, keeping prompts focused, and automating the repetitive parts of token generation, I could get more value from it without wasting time or budget.
Adoption is the real deliverable
Seeing the system scale across products and teams taught me that a design system's value doesn't live in the library, it lives in adoption. What made it worthwhile was watching it shape a common product ecosystem for the benefit of our customers.
