Case Study

A design system an AI can operate

I was the sole designer for a five-module ERP platform. Instead of designing screens faster, I designed the system that designs the screens.

The setup

Zendr is a modular ERP for UK SMEs — billing, inventory, staff, and B2B orders. I joined an early-stage, engineering-led team as the only designer. The math was brutal: one designer, five product modules, four user roles (Admin, Merchant, Staff, Sales Rep), and a roadmap that assumed a design team we didn't have.

So I changed the goal. The deliverable wasn't screens — it was a system so structured, documented, and semantically consistent that anyone, or anything, could extend it correctly without me in the room.

The architecture

Design system documentation — semantic color tokens mapped from hex to primitive to component, with naming schema
  • Three-layer tokens: primitive → semantic → component. Change one brand primitive and light/dark themes update across the entire product. Dark mode wasn't a feature; it was a variable swap.
  • Named for meaning, not appearance. background-brand, never green-500. This decision is what later made the system AI-legible: a machine can't guess what green-500 is for, but it can't misuse background-danger.
  • 400+ components in atomic tiers — cards, tables, modals, forms, charts — each with defined states, so new screens are assembled, not invented.
  • Figma-to-code token sync, so design and build never drifted.

What I'd do differently

Start documentation on day one instead of week six. The components were reusable before the reasoning behind them was, and I paid for that gap in review cycles.

The proof

I left Zendr in December 2025. They haven't hired a designer since — because they haven't needed one. The founder ships new features today by pairing AI tools with the design system: the components, patterns, and semantic tokens are structured clearly enough that AI-generated screens come out consistent with everything I built.

"I used to think a design system's success metric was adoption. Now I think it's what happens after you leave."

Impact

  • 40% faster design-to-dev handoff
  • 50% faster new-module design cycles
  • 100+ screens unified under one system
  • No designer hired since my departure — the system carries the load

Have a similar system to design?

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