← All work · Case 01
Fieldnote.
120-component design system + token architecture for a 30-person product team.
The brief
Inconsistency was the bottleneck.
Fieldnote’s product team had grown from 5 to 30 in eighteen months. The codebase was a patchwork of three different button implementations, two color palettes, and a Figma library nobody trusted. Every new feature meant a half-hour debate about which version of which component to use.
The CEO didn’t want a design system in the abstract. He wanted his team to stop arguing and start shipping. Twelve weeks. One source of truth. Production-grade.
Approach
Audit first. Build to migrate.
We started with a two-week audit covering every screen, every component, every token. We found 47 distinct button variants, 12 different greys, and 8 ways to render a form field. The audit alone changed the conversation: the team could see the cost of inconsistency in concrete numbers.
Then we built in 2-week sprints, alongside the engineering team. Every component shipped to production was immediately migrated in at least one real screen. By week 8, the new system was the path of least resistance, not a parallel project the team had to remember to use.
Results
Numbers, verified.
60%
reduction in design-to-code time, measured over 30 days post-launch
120
components shipped, fully documented, with WCAG 2.1 AA compliance
0
support requests in the first 30 days post-handoff
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