Northwind Capital 

Northwind Capital had grown by acquisition, and it showed. Six products built by six teams meant six button styles, three date pickers, and a brand that fractured the moment a customer moved between tools.

They asked us to build the connective tissue — one design system that every team could build on without slowing down.

A design system only works if people actually use it. The hard part wasn't drawing the components; it was making the system the path of least resistance for teams who already had deadlines and their own way of doing things.

It also had to hold up under fintech's accessibility and compliance bar, where an ambiguous control isn't just ugly — it's a liability.

We audited every existing interface, distilled the patterns worth keeping, and rebuilt them as a single tokenized library shared between Figma and code so design and engineering never drift apart.

Crucially, we shipped it with migration guides and paired with each product team for their first adoption, so the system spread by being useful rather than mandated.

Design-to-dev handoff dropped from weeks to days, because a screen is now assembled from components engineers already trust. New features ship in the brand's voice by default.

A year on, all six products draw from the same system, and onboarding a new designer or engineer takes a fraction of the time it used to.

Design tokens are the single source of truth, generated once and consumed by both Figma variables and a typed React component library published as a versioned package.

Every component ships with accessibility baked in and visual-regression tests, so a change to a token can't silently break a screen three products away.