Context
Kiko is owned end to end by Akhil Ram and used primarily in personal projects. It is not being presented as a live cross-product system adopted by a client or employer.
Problem
Personal product experiments needed a more consistent UI foundation. Repeating one-off decisions across small projects created debt before the work had earned it.
My contribution
Defined early tokens, components, patterns, and documentation for personal product experiments. The system is still being tested and expanded.
- Design Systems
- Product Design
- Frontend Architecture
Decisions that shaped the work
- 01
Tokens-first approach with spacing, typography, color primitives, elevation, and radius systems
- 02
Atoms > molecules > templates component hierarchy
- 03
Plugin-ready Figma organization with variants and auto layout
Process
Auditing recurring UI patterns from personal product work, turning the useful ones into tokens and components, then documenting the decisions while the system is still small enough to change.
Evidence
- Design token documentation
- Component library in Figma
- Storybook implementation
- Usage guidelines
Outcomes and impact
- Created a practical foundation for personal product experiments
- Made recurring interface decisions easier to reuse and question
- I continue to revise the system as I use it in projects
Reflection
Kiko taught me to balance flexibility with structure, build for scalability, and document with empathy so that anyone from junior designers to frontend devs could confidently plug into the system.
