Polygon
Design System
Built a scalable component library and design token system used across five products and two engineering teams.
Year
2023
Industry
Developer Tools
Client
Internal / Open Source
Duration
4 months
01 —Problem
Five products, zero consistency
As the product portfolio grew, each team was building their own buttons, modals, and form elements from scratch. The result was a fragmented user experience and duplicated engineering effort across five separate codebases.
The company needed a single source of truth for UI—something designers and engineers could both trust and contribute to.
02 —Solution
Tokens first, components second
Polygon was built on a semantic token layer—spacing, color, typography, and elevation all defined in JSON and consumed by both Figma and the React component library. Changing a brand color propagated everywhere in minutes.
Each component was documented with live examples, accessibility notes, and prop tables. Adoption went from opt-in to the default for all new feature work within six weeks of launch.
03 —Challenge
Adoption without mandate
The hardest part wasn't building the system—it was getting teams to use it. Engineers who had built their own components were reluctant to migrate, and designers worried about losing creative flexibility.
The solution was a migration-first strategy: we ported the highest-traffic screens first to demonstrate quality, then offered office hours and automated codemods to lower the cost of switching.
04 —Summary
One system, five products
Polygon reduced new-feature UI time by 60% and eliminated 4,000 lines of duplicated component code. It's now open-sourced and used by teams outside the company.
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