It’s common for startups to pivot, and Someday was no exception. Over four years the company went through two rebrands and launched a sub-brand, Zilvermax. Each change could have meant a slow, costly redesign of the platform, but with a design system in place we moved through them at pace.

Why from day one?

In 2020, many startups saw a design system as something for later, once the product worked and there was a revenue stream. In practice, waiting lets design debt build up, the brand and product drift apart, and design stops matching what’s implemented. We chose to invest in a design system from day one so design could keep pace with development and not become the bottleneck.

Approach

As design system lead, working alongside Frank Elbert, I built the system with change and speed in mind. Instead of hardcoding brand choices into components, every visual decision lived in design tokens: colour, typography, spacing, elevation and more. The system went beyond Figma, with documentation and a library of working components in Storybook, giving designers and developers one source of truth.

Spacing was part of the system too. Components carried their own spacing tokens, which switched on when placed in a vertical stack of content and switched off inside other layouts or components. Screens were evenly spaced by default, without spacing being set by hand each time.

When a rebrand arrived, the work shifted from redesigning screens to updating tokens. For the final rebrand by ACHTUNG!, I took the delivered marketing site screens and extended the brand across the entire product. Some deliverables needed refining for product use. The colours were adjusted for accessibility, and one proposed typeface displayed numbers poorly, a real problem in fintech, so I proposed a replacement.

Result

Each rebrand became a transition rather than a rebuild, and adding Zilvermax as a new theme on the same components was fast and uneventful.