Year
2024
Timeline
≈ 2 months to V.1.
Role
Lead Product Designer
The problem
Five designers, on five different projects, doing the same work five times.
Dawn runs multiple projects in parallel, each for a different client with its own brand, visual identity, and patient audience. Every new project meant a designer had to spent a couple of weeks in total just on setup:
Setting up file structures took significant time away from actual design work
Variables, styles & components were being recreated from scratch every time.
Wireframes varied so much across projects that nothing was reusable.
Developers had to relearn file naming and structure for every new handover and designers couldn’t easily jump in to help across projects.
The solution
One foundational Design System that could be configured to any client’s brand.
Following the release, every project started from the same reliable base: same style & variable naming, same components, structure and setup. It enabled faster design and development, allowing more time for the creative part of the process.
The system also doubled as our wireframing library, letting us share and test concepts with clients without revealing the final brand direction.
The how
Starting point: A library of the core components found across all previous projects.
Having built a design system before at Learningbank, I knew the biggest risk wasn't building too little but building too much, and ending up with irrelevant components.
We deliberately scoped V1 to the components that appeared in every project, leaving edge cases for later. I focused on the structural foundation (variables, naming conventions, cross-project consistency) while my colleague built out most of the components we prioritized.
Would a shared design system mean we deliver white-labeled apps? The opposite.
Brand definition always comes first, with the system having to adapt to the brand, not the other way around. The goal was never to replace creative work but to eliminate the repetitive setup. The core library covers around 70% of components consistent across projects, leaving room to adapt or create new ones for each brand's needs.
Here's how that looked in practice for my IBD client app:
From a design tool to shared infrastructure across design and development
V1 solved the design team's problem. V2 extended it to developers. There was back and forth on how to structure the JSON files and align variable naming between design and code, but once that was settled, developers could implement components directly from the system. What started as a way to speed up design setup became a shared foundation for the whole product team.