Building a scalable design system for a global risk platform

TL;DR

A risk and compliance team at a global pharmaceutical company had a product family with no shared design language. Inconsistent UI, messy handoffs, slow prototyping. The team wanted speed and consistency, and dataviz was a core part of every product they shipped.

Four weeks to audit and build a scalable system. Atomic methodology, cross-referenced against their existing brand hub. Accessibility issues found and fixed during the audit. Dataviz built in as a first-class part of the system, not an afterthought.

The system stayed in active use across the rest of the 6-month engagement as new products and services were designed on top of it.

A product family with no shared design language.

A risk and compliance team at a global pharmaceutical company was working across a family of internal products covering different functions. No shared design language. UI varied depending on who built it, handoffs to engineering were messy, prototyping took longer than it should. The team wanted two things: faster prototyping and consistency across the family. Dataviz was a core part of how every product communicated information, so it had to be part of any system worth its name.

Inconsistencies, accessibility gaps, and a brand hub already in place.

Four weeks, atomic methodology, sign-offs throughout. Full audit of the existing Figma files covered UI, palette, dataviz, and typography. The team had an existing brand hub, so we cross-referenced against it and built the new system to align rather than replace. During the audit we found UI colours that weren't passing accessibility checks. Swept the full palette, optimised, and shipped corrected colours into the system foundation. Components, states, layouts, and documentation followed, with Dev Mode configured so engineers could pull tokens directly from Figma. I collaborated closely with the data-viz designer from a partner agency throughout.

Dataviz isn't usually part of a Figma design system. It needed to be here.

The unusual piece. Dataviz was central to every product in the family, but data-visualisation components aren't typically something you can build inside Figma. We embedded a paid Figma plugin into the workflow and treated dataviz as its own subsystem alongside the atomic components, with styling, documentation, and worked examples. The team could prototype real charts in Figma the same way they prototyped any other UI. That was the piece that genuinely unlocked the prototyping speed they'd asked for.

A system the team kept using.

The design system stayed in active use across the rest of the 6-month engagement, with new products and services designed on top of it while components were maintained in parallel.

Design systems work when they fit what the team actually ships. For this team, that meant dataviz.

Atomic components are the foundation. They're not enough on their own when the products being built rely on charts to communicate. Treating dataviz as its own subsystem rather than an afterthought is what unlocked the prototyping speed the team had asked for.