Design Systems – Mehak Qureshi Portfolio

Style Guides

The goal was to create a unified design system for a suite of products to ensure a cohesive user experience, improve design efficiency, and maintain visual consistency across platforms (web, mobile, desktop). This design system needed to scale as the product offerings expanded and adapt to multiple platforms with ease.

Overview

A growing suite of digital products was being developed across web, mobile, and desktop platforms without a consistent visual language or shared component standard. Teams were repeatedly designing similar interface elements, creating inconsistencies across products and slowing the delivery of new features.

I helped establish a scalable design system that brought reusable components, visual standards, documentation, and usage guidelines into one shared framework. The goal was to improve consistency across products, reduce duplicated design effort, and give designers and developers a more efficient foundation for building and expanding digital experiences.

Sector

Design Systems

Challenge

Multiple digital products were being developed across teams without a shared component standard or consistent visual language. This created duplicated design effort, inconsistent experiences, and additional implementation work for designers and developers.

My Role

Design Systems Architect — component library design, design governance, cross-functional stakeholder alignment, developer handoff specifications, adoption strategy.

Project Time

Ongoing since 2023 — initial system architecture and component library established over the first quarter, with continued governance and expansion across new interfaces since.

Challenges

Implementing any design system comes with challenges. However, there are unique challenges you’ll run into when scaling a design system to multiple teams and multiple websites.

One of the biggest hurdles design system teams face is getting widespread adoption across their organization. You can create the most beautiful, well-thought-out design system in the world, but it’s worthless if developers aren’t actually using it.

Solutions

The key to solving the problem is to make integration as frictionless as possible for developers. Instead of asking them to become experts in your design system, provide tools that are already well versed in your preferences.

A better solution to all of this manual work is to use a design to code tool with design system support. This approach most effectively eases the learning curve and makes migration easier, significantly boosting adoption rates. Builder’s Visual Copilot is one example of such a tool.

Design System Methodology

The design system followed an Atomic Design approach, moving from foundational styles and design tokens to reusable components, patterns, and complete product experiences. This structure helped maintain consistency while making the system easier to scale, document, and maintain across products.

Base Tokens

Core design decisions that define the visual foundation, including color, typography, spacing, radius, elevation, and sizing.

Purpose / Semantic Tokens

Meaning-based values for text, surfaces, actions, borders, status, and feedback, mapped to real product use cases.

Component Tokens

Component-specific values applied across buttons, inputs, cards, navigation, and other reusable interface patterns.

What's Inside

breadcrumb

We enhance user experience with breadcrumb navigation. We used it as a secondary navigation scheme on the website, where visitors may want to go deeper into the site hierarchy.

Cards Component

Built flexible card layouts with clear spacing, hierarchy, and interaction states to create consistent content patterns across products.

Standard Branch Page Layout

Image Carousel

Defined reusable carousel behavior, navigation, and responsive rules to ensure consistent media experiences across screen sizes.

Workflow Stepper / Progress Indicator

A horizontal step indicator used in multi-stage approval and reconciliation flows, showing users where they are in a process and what’s still ahead. Designed to handle both linear flows with a fixed number of steps and conditional flows where steps appear or disappear based on approval routing.

Search & Filter

Developed search and filtering patterns that help users quickly locate relevant information within complex datasets.

Data Table

The most-reused component in the library, given how much of the workflow data across Built with sortable columns, inline status badges, and a fixed action column so users can act on a row (approve, flag, escalate) without losing their place in a long list.

Alert / Notification Banner

Used to surface time-sensitive workflow issues—a failed reconciliation, an approval nearing its deadline, or a data-sync error—directly in context rather than through a separate notifications panel users had to remember to check. Severity is color-coded using the same status logic as the badges above, so users only need to learn one color system across the product.

Badges

Designed reusable status badges to communicate priorities, states, and workflow conditions clearly across products.

Video Player

Structured video controls, playback states, and responsive behavior for a consistent viewing experience across applications.

Data Visualization

Established reusable visualization patterns for presenting complex operational data clearly and supporting faster decision-making.

Focus State

Colors

Icons & Illustrations

Merchant Logos

Merchant logos play a crucial role in enhancing the credibility, trust, and overall user experience of a website. They serve as visual cues that instantly recognize brands and products, guiding customers through their online shopping journey.

Skeleton Loader

Introduced loading-state patterns that maintain layout structure and provide clear feedback while content is being retrieved.

Modals

Created modal layouts and interaction rules that support focused tasks while maintaining clear user context.

Numeric Input

Improved numeric input patterns with validation, formatting, and error handling for accurate data entry.

Toggle Switch

Refined toggle behavior, states, and labeling to make binary settings easy to understand and control.

What I’ve Learned

The hardest part of a design system isn’t building it — it’s getting people to use it once it exists. Early on, I assumed a well-documented component library would drive adoption on its own. It didn’t. Adoption only took off once the system was genuinely faster than building from scratch — when using it saved a team real time on their next deadline, not just theoretical time down the line. That shifted how I think about design systems work generally: governance matters, but usability for the builders, not just the end users, is what determines whether a system actually gets used.

Wanna collaborate?

Let’s chat.

Name

(required)

Hey, thanks for checking out my work.

I’ve been fascinated with the way people interact with technology since forever. I’m particularly keen on digital products designed to make life easier for human beings.

What are you working on?

If you want to know more about my design process, or if you want to talk about a cool idea, don’t hesitate to hit me up.