The Problem
A bank with no shared
design language.
When I joined Barclays in late 2019, it became clear the Group's digital products were built on fragmented, inconsistent foundations. Work on the design system began almost immediately. Different teams had developed their own patterns, components, and visual approaches independently — creating a fractured experience for customers and an impossible maintenance burden for designers and developers.
There was no single source of truth. No shared vocabulary. No way to ship consistently across products without enormous duplication of effort. The absence of a design system wasn't just a design problem — it was a delivery problem, a quality problem, and a brand problem simultaneously.
The Insight
A design system is only as valuable as its adoption. Building it is the easy part. Making it the path of least resistance for every team — that's the real design challenge.
— Principle that shaped the system's architecture
The insight that shaped our approach was simple: most design systems fail not because they're badly designed, but because they're too hard to use. Teams default to building their own patterns because it's faster than navigating a system that wasn't built with their workflow in mind.
That meant the system had to work at two levels simultaneously — rigorous enough to enforce consistency, flexible enough that teams never felt constrained. And it had to ship as both design tooling and production code from day one, so design and engineering were always in sync.
The System
Four layers. One language.
The Barclays Group Design System was structured in four interconnected layers — each dependent on the ones below it, each serving a different audience within the organisation.
The Team
Seven designers. One
shared standard.
Building a system of this scale required a dedicated team — not designers split between system work and product work, but a focused group whose entire remit was the quality and evolution of the design language.
Outcomes
What it achieved.
Reflection
What a design system
really is.
A design system is not a Figma library. It's not a React package. It's not even a set of guidelines. A design system is an agreement between teams about how to work together — and the artefacts are just the tangible expression of that agreement.
Building the Barclays Group Design System taught me that the hardest problems were never technical. They were organisational. Getting teams to trust the system, contribute to it, and advocate for it internally — that was the real work.
The fact that it's still maintained and evolved by a dedicated team years later is the outcome I'm most proud of. Not the component count. Not the React library. The fact that it stuck.