Tangram: the Design System of RD Station products
Created to unify the visual and technical language between design and engineering, Tangram has become a central piece in the evolution of our users' experience. More details can be found in the documentation.
About project
Tangram is the design system for RD Station's products, created with the goal of scaling visual consistency, team efficiency, and user experience quality. More than just a component library, Tangram has established itself as a strategic bridge between design and engineering, supporting different teams in building interfaces aligned with the brand identity and business objectives.
The name Tangram was chosen to represent a set of modular pieces that, when combined intelligently, enable the creation of multiple solutions—just like the teams at RD build their products.
Challenge
RD Station has a structure of multiple autonomous teams working on different products, with diverse needs and varying rhythms. This created challenges such as:
- Inconsistent interfaces across products.
- Repetition of effort in design and frontend.
- Complexity in scaling new initiatives with quality.
Additionally, the design system had to be accessible and valuable for both designers and developers, providing tools, processes, and governance aligned with the company's culture and the evolving platform.
My role
I worked from the conception of Tangram through its consolidation as a strategic company initiative. My main contributions were:
- Strategy and scope: I helped define the design system vision by mapping the teams' real needs and connecting the deliverables to business objectives.
- Co-construction with engineering: I worked closely with developers to ensure that the components were accessible, reusable, and scalable, focusing on the developer experience as well as the visual aspect.
- Governance and support: I established processes to scale the healthy use of the design system, supporting other designers and teams with documentation, reviews, and alignment rituals.
- Design Ops as a lever: I used Design Ops practices to integrate Tangram into the daily work of designers, optimizing how teams create, test, and evolve interfaces.
- Education and community: I facilitated training sessions, wrote strategic documentation, and helped foster a culture of collaboration around the system.
Impact
With Tangram, we managed to reduce rework, accelerate the time-to-market for new features, and increase visual consistency across products. The design system became an internal reference for UI decisions, being adopted by multiple product teams and directly contributing to the scalability of RD Station’s platform.
Beyond the visual and technical gains, Tangram also elevated design maturity within the company, strengthening the partnership between design and engineering and increasing team autonomy.
