Design systems should get out of the way.
I build the infrastructure — token architecture, Figma libraries, and AI-ready pipelines — that let your team focus on what actually matters.
Three things I'm hired for
Machine-readable architecture
Token naming, prop conventions, and documentation structured so AI prototyping tools can generate against the system accurately — not just a Figma library, but infrastructure that serves human designers and automated pipelines alike.
Governance at scale
Contribution frameworks, adoption metrics, and deprecation processes that keep a system coherent across 60 brands or 150+ products. The hard part isn't building components — it's keeping them reliable as the organisation ships against them.
Design-to-code pipeline
StyleDictionary, Figma Variables, CSS custom properties, W3C DTCG tokens — bidirectional sync between design and engineering. A custom Figma plugin built with Claude that automated token transforms across Figma, code, and docs at once.
Design systems, built and scaled at three different scales
From a from-zero startup build to 60 enterprise brands to 150+ products across five tech stacks — the same question every time: what makes this reliable for everyone who ships against it?
One token architecture across 60+ brands
Re-architected a flat token model into a three-tier default/override system, automated the Figma-to-code handoff, and split shared components from product-owned patterns to remove the DS bottleneck.
20 → 60+ brands · onboarding 2 wks → 2 days
Unifying 150+ products across five tech stacks
A spec-first, stack-agnostic system on a governed Material foundation with an industrial extension layer, tiered adoption tracked at programme level, and a dedicated engineer + QA I made the case to hire.
150+ products · 5 stacks · 40+ components
Machine-readable token architecture & an AI sync pipeline
A three-tier token model with naming built for machine readability, plus a Figma → StyleDictionary → code pipeline built with Claude to keep design, code, and docs in sync.
Pipeline rebuilt in under 2 weeksNot design-system cases — product problems, solved with method
Supporting evidence that the systems work is backed by hands-on product design and front-end delivery.
Northwest Vipers — website redesign
Full ownership end-to-end: rebuilt a broken WordPress site as a static 11ty + Markdown platform non-technical members can maintain, and fixed a four-squad equity problem through information architecture.
Cycloid — nested teams & permission inheritance
Designed a nested team hierarchy with inherited, role-based permissions when an EU contract broke the flat model — scoping a complex problem into three shippable surfaces and flagging assumptions early.
Field notes from the work
Mostly design systems — tokens, governance, and the decisions that keep them reliable — with detours into product design, front-end, and whatever else I'm building.
Should AI be the tool or make the tool?
A question I keep asking, and a principle I've been applying longer than AI has existed.
A map quiz for the two countries I live between
A web component that quizzes you on regions of a map. Partly a geography project, partly an excuse to learn something new.
How I stopped setting up design tokens by hand
A Figma plugin that handles the primitive layer you always end up building before the real work starts.
Communicating design systems with Lego
A hands-on workshop that makes "just use what's in the box" click.
Twelve years making design systems load-bearing
I've designed for the web since 2000 — the last twelve years focused on design systems. I've built the design function from scratch at a startup, led the enterprise system at AVEVA across a 20-person UX org, and managed a five-designer team scaling 60 brands at Atolls. I design and write front-end — HTML/CSS, React, Vue, Angular — so the spec and the code never drift apart.
Accessibility (WCAG 2.1) runs through every role. Off the clock I chair and coach an American football club in the northwest of Ireland — governance, budgets, and a website I designed and built myself.
