Forge Design System

A growing organization with 12 product teams had severe UI inconsistency. Each team maintained their own component libraries, leading to duplicated effort, accessibility violations, and a fragmented user experience. Onboarding new engineers took weeks because they had to learn team-specific patterns.

I led the design and development of a unified design system built on React and TypeScript. The system includes a comprehensive component library, design tokens for theming, and automated tooling for accessibility compliance. I established a contribution model that allowed product teams to propose and build components within the system's constraints.

The design system is published as a monorepo of npm packages: core components, icons, tokens, and utilities. Components are built with React using a compound component pattern for flexibility, styled with Tailwind CSS and design tokens for consistent theming. Storybook serves as the documentation and testing environment, with Chromatic for visual regression testing and Playwright for interaction testing. A custom Figma plugin syncs design tokens bidirectionally between Figma and code.

The biggest challenge was adoption. I solved this through a progressive migration strategy, building compatibility layers that wrapped existing components and gradually replacing internals. Performance was another concern. I implemented tree-shaking optimizations and lazy-loaded component registries that reduced bundle sizes by 40% compared to monolithic imports.

The design system now powers all 12 product applications with 95% component reuse. Accessibility violations dropped by 80%, and new engineer onboarding time was cut in half. The contribution model has grown to include 40+ engineers submitting components, with automated CI checks ensuring quality standards.