While working in a design agency, I led the initiative of creating our own in-house visual design system for client websites and custom software called Nouveau. This system allowed our design team to work considerably more efficiently, enabling designers like myself to spend more time on establishing creative direction.
Project after project, I started noticing that our design responsibilities included a number of redundant tasks that I began to explore in more detail.
While working as a senior designer, I noticed our team was spending a significant portion of project time on repetitive formatting work. Despite strong creative ideas, we were constantly bottlenecked by manual layout setup and component duplication. I proposed building an internal design system to shift focus from formatting to creativity.
Every design we created featured dozens of components, each with individual elements that all required the designer's attention when styling.
I worked closely with other designers to understand pain points and workflow preferences. Their feedback helped me identify which components needed standardization and which ones should remain flexible. These conversations formed the foundation of Nouveau—a lean, modular system that balanced consistency with creative freedom.
I met with our team to gain a deep understanding of the problems we were facing, but also how they affected our team's creative output.
A major concern was avoiding visual sameness across projects. I designed Nouveau to provide layout and component shortcuts without enforcing a specific style. By focusing on universal spacing, grid logic, and interface patterns, the system made setup faster—while still allowing full creative expression and branding flexibility per client.
Grids were a key design consideration, so it was essential that we use an easily-applicable system that allowed for maximum creative flexibility.
Breaking down designs into a series of components made it easier to understand what types of variables needed to be considered.
Creation of easily customizable and modular sections made it possible to ideate page layouts quickly, which all contained elements synced to a global style palette.
We piloted Nouveau in several client projects to refine how components handled edge cases and design deviations. One of the best outcomes was the speed at which designers could try alternate layouts with a few clicks. This unlocked more creative iterations per project and allowed us to solve design problems earlier in the process.
After each project we would look at the new sections created and determine if a modified, simple version could be added into the design system to save time on future projects.
Format-heavy sections like calendars became trivial to add into designs, greating speeding up the team's ability to present artboards for review.
Platform-specific versions of the system made the design experience increasingly efficient as we expanded the platforms our team was able to deliver projects on.
We circulated out header and footer template starting points as design trends changed, ensuring the foundation of Nouveau remained modern and professional.
Later applications of Nouveau expanded to include HTML email sections that we could design and develop en bulk through batch commands.
Nouveau became an integral tool in our agency’s design process. It cut project setup time significantly, empowered designers to focus on high-impact creative decisions, and improved the overall quality of our client deliverables. It also created a shared language between design and dev teams, resulting in smoother handoffs and implementation.
