Raptive · Design Systems · 2026

Community Design Infrastructure

Building a development environment from 0 to 1 so design, engineering and product could work in one continuous loop

Zero to one · sole designer and system owner · the work is ongoing

INTERNALThe design environmentPrivate to the teamEvery token, component, pattern and prototype, running in a browser for anyone on the team to open. It is Raptive’s internal system, so there is no public URL to visit.

Company: Raptive
Role: Sole designer and design system owner. Architecture, tokens, governance, research, build.
Duration: 4 weeks
Team: Design, Product, Engineering
Scope: The tokens, the component library, a place to build working prototypes, and the Figma, Jira and GitHub connections behind them, supporting 12 to 15 engineers. I also owned governance, motion, and the first structured research practice the platform has had.
Where it runs: EnvironmentA live prototype app the whole team opens in a browser, built in React and Vite, deployed privately
Production, webThe community platform, which runs on Discourse and Ember
Production, mobileA separate React Native app

At a glance

The environment in four numbers. The last one is the point of the other three.

4 weeksBuilt inSolo, from scratch

236Token valuesMatched to the values already in code

96Components and patterns67 components, 29 patterns

Feedback loopHandoff modelSequential before this

Counts on this page were measured on 10 September 2026. Each one was counted by a tool rather than kept by hand, so any of them can be checked again.

Reframing the problem

The design system lived in a Figma file. There was nowhere to see it running.

One designer, 12 to 15 engineers, 2 product managers. Any team that needed a prototype built its own. Everything moved in sequence. Each step lost a little: Figma drifts from what production does, a static file can’t show you what something feels like once you click it, and a new visual direction means rebuilding every screen by hand.

A better Figma file was never going to fix that. What was missing was somewhere the work could actually run.

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