As a designer moving between companies
Every new design system meant relearning someone else's conventions, disciplined or not. I had no portable foundation of my own to start from.
All case studies
Design System · Personal Project
An unbranded design system, built from the cracks four banks left behind.
Every bank I worked with had its own design system, and every time, I started from zero. Natuna Digilab fixes that: a foundation that doesn't belong to any one brand, so it moves with me, only the tokens changing underneath.
- Role
- Creator & Maintainer
- Status
- v1.0, still building
- Scale
- 1,600+ components
- Distribution
- Figma Community
Context
The same weak point, at every team.
Right after leaving BSI in 2023, I looked back at every team I'd worked with and found the same weak point: the design system. Not the visual polish: the discipline behind it, the thing meant to hold a product together, kept breaking down in practice. So I built Natuna Digilab as my own initiative: a foundation I could trust instead of rebuilding one from scratch every time.
The problem
One button, rebuilt five different ways.
As someone handing off to engineering
Developers kept asking the same specific questions: “why is this hex different here,” “why does this stroke width change for no reason.” The things supposed to be consistent by definition, weren't.
For the wider design community
Most design systems on Figma Community are heavily branded (colors, logos, identity baked in), so people have to “un-brand” them before they're useful as a starting point.
Process
Architecture decisions, in order.
- 1
Token-first, not component-first
Built from five token categories before any component existed: Color (--color-*), Typography (--text-*), Effect (--shadow-*), Number (--spacing-*), and Icons (on Phosphor as a neutral base). Rebrand the foundation, and only the token values change, not every component.
- 2
Unbranded by design, not by default
A deliberate choice, not a limitation. Neutral on purpose, so it works as a starting point for anyone instead of one brand identity. Most public design systems do the opposite: double as a showcase for their creator's brand.
- 3
Dev Mode annotations & clean token exports
Both prove the foundation isn't just built to look good in Figma: there's real attention to how a developer consumes it at handoff.
- 4
Trial and error, before it was a system
The earliest version was trial and error. There was a pull to copy proven systems (Wise, Gojek's Asphalt/Aloha), but Natuna stayed anchored to its own principle: unbranded, ours. Every component went through repeated iteration before being called “done.”
The solution
Two components that prove the depth.
Natuna Digilab is at v1.0 and still building. 1,600+ components, full variable support across five token categories, distributed on Figma Community so others can use it too.
Button
Full property set: Shape, Type, State, Size (sm to 2xl), swappable icons, editable label. Dozens of variant combinations, all from one component definition instead of duplicated one-offs.
Input Field
Type, optional attached button, toggleable label, description, helper and character count, nested instances instead of flattened layers. Only this configurable because every state pulls from the same tokens.
Outcome
Ideas that flow both ways.
- 5 users
- on Figma Community, organic and with no promotion yet
- Two-way
- relationship with BRISPOT's design system: ideas flow in both directions
Ideas from Natuna Digilab shaped BRISPOT's token architecture, and patterns that proved out there folded back into Natuna Digilab. No big external number yet, but it speeds up how I work on every new project.
Reflection
If the other case studies show the result of a solid design system, Natuna Digilab shows how I build that foundation in the first place. From zero, not just inheriting whatever a company hands me.