Design system
Atlas Design System
One shared design language for six product teams and more than 200 screens of a logistics platform.
- Role
- Design systems lead
- Client
- Northway Logistics
- Year
- 2023
- Services
- Component design, Documentation, Accessibility
Overview
Northway builds software that helps freight companies plan routes, track shipments and manage warehouses. After years of fast growth, its six product teams had each built their own buttons, tables and forms. I led a team of three designers and two engineers to create Atlas, a shared design system for the whole platform.
The challenge
An audit found 14 different date pickers, nine shades of “primary” blue and data tables that broke on the small laptop screens used in warehouses. Every new feature took longer to design and build than it should have, and accessibility problems kept slipping through.
What I did
- Audited more than 200 screens and agreed on shared foundations for colour, type, spacing and motion.
- Designed and documented 48 components, starting with the dense data tables that power most of the platform.
- Worked with engineering to ship every component in React, with matching Figma libraries.
- Built accessibility into the components themselves, so every team got keyboard support and good contrast for free.
The outcome
Within a year, teams were shipping new screens twice as fast, and all six had moved their main products onto Atlas. Accessibility issues found in testing dropped by 70%, and new designers now get up to speed in days rather than weeks.