1 of 2 designers / Q3 of 2025 / ui design & design systems
DESIGN SYSTEMS· BRANDING · INTERNSHIP
Tess Design System
Rebranded and documented a design system to help eight product teams align on a shared visual language.
As a design intern at IBM, I was part of a three-person team designing multiple internal products for a global automobile client. Different teams were spearheading developments for different products, and without a consistent way of sharing visual language or design components, they were slowly drifting apart.
A design kit existed in Figma, but it wasn't being updated or used consistently. My role was to help make it something everyone would actually want to use.
ROLE
visual design intern
3 months (2023)
design systems
branding
visual design
TIMELINE
SKILLS
The challenge
Having a design system and having an adopted design system are two different things. The kit existed, but the documentation was sparse and there was no reason for product teams to trust it. For teams to use the design system and the documentation site, it needed to feel trustworthy, dynamic, and up to date.
Making it feel like something
My team gave me real creative ownership over the rebrand, which was genuinely exciting as an intern. I brought visual explorations to our team meetings so we could shape the concept together rather than just react to something already decided.
We built a moodboard together, pulling references from design systems we admired — Material Design, Microsoft Fluent, and more editorial references around geometry, pattern, and color.
With this design system, we wanted to convey that smaller pieces working together to fit into a seamless whole. The concept we landed on was tessellation, which felt like an honest metaphor for what a design system actually does.
From there I explored different visual directions in Adobe Illustrator, playing with cube forms and geometric structures.
The Tess Design System embraces a lively and vibrant color palette, reflecting a theme of creativity, movement, and innovation. Its branding pays tribute to the art of tessellation mosaics, where diverse pieces unite to create a harmonious whole.
Closing the gaps
With the brand direction set, I turned to the documentation. I ran a gap analysis comparing the existing site to the Figma kit, mapping what existed, what was missing, and what needed restructuring.
Using IBM Carbon and Google Material as benchmarks for documentation standards, I rebuilt the site architecture with a new sitemap and wrote component documentation pages for 30+ components. This site covered component usage, variants, formatting, behaviors, and modifiers. I worked with the team to gather real use cases for every component so the documentation reflected how people were actually building.
Keeping it current
For the rest of the summer, I maintained the system week to week and pushed release notes as the kit evolved. A design system only stays trustworthy if it stays current.
Impact
At the end of the summer, Tess was presented as a shared resource across the product teams on the account. A few months after I left, a colleague who joined the team told me she encountered Tess during onboarding, and that it was being continuously worked on and integrated into workflows. To me, that felt like the best possible outcome for this project!