WebYes Design System 2.0 · 2025
One design system that made a 9-person team design 70% faster
WebYes ships across eight platforms: two SaaS products, multiple WordPress plugins and browser extensions. Each had drifted into its own visual language. I led the rebuild: an accessibility-first, three-tier tokenised system, built with AI in two weeks and designed to be used by the whole team, not just designers.
- My role
- Design system lead
- Team
- 2 designers · engineering · PM
- Timeline
- 2 weeks focused build
- Status
- Live · in use across 8 platforms
- Published
- 2025 · 4 min read
The problem
Eight platforms, eight dialects. The same button rendered with different spacing and colour on every surface, every new screen started from scratch, and accessibility was checked per screen instead of guaranteed once.
Impact
- 8
- Platforms unifiedTwo SaaS products, plugins and extensions on one source of truth
- 493
- Design tokens192 brand · 140 alias · 161 mapping
- 2 wks
- Build timeWith AI generating scaffolds and documentation
- ~70%
- Faster design workflowAcross a nine-person product team
What I did
- 01
Led the rebuild
Owned the architecture, the tokens, the documentation and the rollout, working with two designers, engineering and a PM.
- 02
Three token tiers, so change flows down
192 brand primitives, 140 alias tokens and 161 mapping tokens. Change a value once and every component on every platform follows.
- 03
Built with AI in two weeks
Claude Code generated component scaffolds and documentation from the token spec. I reviewed, corrected and shipped, and documented the system so both people and machines can read it.
- 04
Made it usable beyond design
PMs and engineers now build low-fidelity screens, internal pages and AI-generated UI themselves. Design dependency fell by 60 to 70%.
In the product
The full story
Behind the password: how the three tiers were decided, what the AI got wrong, and how adoption was measured across the team.
