Date
Dec 2024 - Present
Kiko was a comprehensive design system built to serve as the foundation for fast-moving product teams — similar in philosophy to Blank Design. It focused on clean foundations, responsive tokens, and systematic UI patterns across platforms.
Industry
Design
What did I do?
Designed the core version of a design system.
What did I learn?
Systems thinking, build for scalability.
The Project
Kiko is a modular design system developed as part of the Download Studios framework, designed to give early-stage products a scalable and flexible foundation.
Why Kiko ?
Speed up design and dev collaboration
Standardize UI across experiments and micro-products
Stay light, extendable, and accessible — like Blank Design, but with our own flavor
What did I do
Created core UI tokens: spacing, typography scales, color primitives, elevation, and radius systems
Built foundational components like buttons, inputs, modals, tabs — all with interactive states and responsive behavior
Defined structure for atoms > molecules > templates — so it was usable across both marketing and product UI
Documented usage in a clear, visual style — making handoff to devs frictionless
Maintained a library in Figma with variants, auto layout, and plugin-ready organization
Why it mattered
Made the design output consistent across multiple projects (Download Studios tools, marketing sites, and app experiments)
Reduced decision fatigue for designers working across teams
Became a shared language between product and design — faster mockups, fewer guesswork gaps
Future-proofed UI by making every new idea part of a repeatable system
Impact
Improved design speed and reduced decision fatigue for product designers
Enabled cleaner dev handoffs and reusable code components
Became the go-to foundation for future product experiments and UI refreshes
Note
I can't upload the images of the work here yet, but it will soon be live.
Why did I mention it here then eh?
I did because I wanted to let you know that I can do the work.
Not "The End" yet!
Designing the core version of a design system for cross-product consistency and rapid team scaling. While I am doing that I can now think in systems, not just screens. I learned to balance flexibility with structure, build for scalability, and document with empathy so that anyone from junior designers to front-end dev could confidently plug into the system.