Case Study · In progress
The design system that couldn't grow
At Viamagus I'm lead designer on Synthia, a middleware AI platform that automates workflows and optimizes processes at the organizational level. It's pre-MVP and under wraps — but the most interesting problem there isn't confidential, because it wasn't a screen. It was a diagnosis.
The diagnosis
Synthia had a design system already. It worked — for the product that existed. The components had been built around specific screens and flows, which meant every new feature either broke them or spawned a one-off variant. That's the most common way a design system fails, and it's rarely noticed as a failure: the system looks fine, the team just gets slower, and the product quietly fragments. It was built bottom-up, extracted from what had been designed already. It worked for the past and fought the future.
What I did
I rebuilt the components to compose rather than to match — designed against the shapes of problems rather than the shapes of existing screens — and modernized the visual language while I was in there, so the system reads as contemporary and cohesive rather than accumulated.
The part that was actually hard
It wasn't technical. To leadership, the work looked like a restyle — because the visible change was cosmetic and the load-bearing change was invisible. Making the case that this same work was a scalability fix — that consistency isn't decoration, it's what lets a small team ship fast without the product fragmenting — was the argument that mattered. Winning it in an engineering-led org, upward, without being the person who decides, is the work I'm proudest of there.
"They saw a restyle. What it actually was: the difference between a system built for the screens we had and one built for the features we hadn't designed yet."
Why this pairs with Zendr
Two design systems, opposite problems. Zendr: build one from zero, structured so it outlives the designer. Synthia: inherit one that's failing, find out why, rebuild it to scale — and win the argument for it. Greenfield and brownfield.