Vanguard · 2025-2026
Built Vanguard's Appian component library from scratch, cutting handoff from 3 weeks to 4 days
Vanguards Workplace Solutions teams were designing internal tools on Appian SAIL with no shared library. I built one, from token architecture to components, and 6 product teams adopted it.
- Role
- Product Design, Design Systems
- Years
- 2025 - 2026
- Read
- 2 min read
- Unique Components
- 816+
- Unique Components
- Patterns
- 10+
- Patterns
- Teams adopted
- 6+
- Teams adopted
- Handoff from 3 weeks
- 4 Days
- Handoff from 3 weeks
Overview
Appian let Vanguard build workflow apps fast. But every team designed on its own, so the same workflows ended up with different navigation, forms, tables, statuses and validation. Appian SAIL has its own component rules. Without a library that matched them, designers drew what devs couldn't build, and every handoff became a translation job.
Challange
01: How might we give designers a Figma library that maps one-to-one to what Appian SAIL can actually build?
02: How might we make one library work across 6 teams building different products?
My Role
I owned the work end to end, from audit to adoption: the audit, the library architecture, the Figma components, the workflow patterns, publishing, and running adoption sessions with designers and developers.
Principles I set: design for Appian, not against it · reuse over reinvention · one reference point for design and dev · a system that grows through real work
Solution
Token architecture:
I matched Figma to Appian's native fonts, styles and color tokens, so designs reflected what developers could actually build. Primitives → semantic → component tokens, so one change cascades everywhere.
Component library
816 component instances and 10+ patterns covering what every workflow repeats, built to mirror SAIL's constraints.
Handoff
Specs devs could build directly, with no translation step.
Treated adoption as design work.
I published the core library on Jan 15, 2026, then ran working sessions, shared real examples and presented at UX Acumen for our team. Designers began asking for the templates, which is how I knew it had become a working reference.
Outcome
A design system succeeds when it changes how teams work, not when it's documented. This one moved teams from designing screens to designing systems, and from local fixes to shared infrastructure.
Impact
6 teams adopted the library, and handoff dropped from 3 weeks to 4 days
- Unique Components
- 816+
- Unique Components
- Patterns
- 10+
- Patterns
- Teams adopted
- 6+
- Teams adopted
- Handoff from 3 weeks
- 4 Days
- Handoff from 3 weeks