When I joined Canlan Sports, the company had minimal brand direction—just a simple PDF with unclear usage guidelines. There was no structured design documentation, which made consistency difficult across their growing products and platforms. I saw an opportunity to build a comprehensive design system that would become the foundation for all future design work.

As Design Lead, I owned the entire system from conception to implementation—researching best practices that fit within our needs, collaborating with product teams and developers, and maintaining documentation as the system evolved.

The challenge was starting from almost nothing. I needed to audit existing design patterns across all platforms, identify what was working, and expand thoughtfully from there. This meant building a comprehensive color system with semantic tokens, establishing typography standards with Gilroy as the primary font and Neue Plak reserved for headline treatments, creating a spacing system, implementing responsive layouts, and standardizing an icon library. The system was built digital-first to serve web and product needs, with CMYK conversions documented for print.

The design system became the reference point for all Canlan design work. New designers onboarded faster. Developers had tokens to implement without back-and-forth. The team moved quicker knowing designs would stay consistent. We improved accessibility by fixing low-contrast issues like our old navigation. And when building tournament logos with brand sponsorships, the system gave us flexibility while keeping everything on-brand.