Halo Labs
Software
2025
A design system that lets 60 engineers ship like designers.
Six product teams, six interpretations of the same button. We built the system they actually reach for — and paid it back in a quarter.
Client
Halo Labs
Services
Design system · Product
Duration
9 weeks
Year
2025
Overview
Halo Labs had grown from one product to six in under three years. Each team had forked the same component library, and no two forks agreed on spacing, focus states or what counted as a destructive action.
We rebuilt the system from the primitives up and shipped it as code first, design second — the order engineers actually work in.
1 quarter
Payback period
60
Engineers on it
−72%
UI bug reports
The work
The challenge
The old library was not ignored, it was over-forked. Fixing a bug meant fixing it six times, and design review had turned into an archaeology exercise. Engineers were not being careless; they simply had no canonical answer to reach for.
What we did
We started with tokens rather than components: spacing, radius, elevation and a colour set defined once and mapped to both Figma variables and CSS custom properties, generated from the same source.
On top of that sits a deliberately small component set — thirty-one pieces, each with its states, keyboard behaviour and accessibility notes written next to the code. Anything a team needed beyond it goes through a weekly intake that either absorbs it or explains why not.
The outcome
Adoption reached all six teams inside two months without a mandate, because the system was faster than forking. UI bug reports dropped by nearly three quarters, and the first quarter's saved engineering time covered the cost of the engagement.
