YEAR
2025
COMPANY
Anthesis Group
ROLE
UX Lead
Leadership
Strategy
Stakeholder Management
Information Architecture
INDUSTRY
Sustainability Consulting
SUMMARY
I drove the strategic direction and execution of a unified design system for Anthesis — aligning design, development, and brand across seven fragmented digital products.
device
Desktop
PLATFORM
Web
💡 Overview
Built a unified design system for Anthesis — bringing consistency, accessibility, and development efficiency across seven fragmented digital products. Starting with a full cross-product audit and cross-functional workshops, we established a shared component library and design language that reduced design and build time, eliminated component duplication, and laid the foundation for consolidating all products into a single unified platform.
Results:
Faster design and build cycles through reusable, documented components
Consistent user experience across all seven products
Improved usability through familiar, predictable patterns
Shared design language reducing friction between design and development
Platform-ready architecture enabling future product consolidation
Overview
Problem
Anthesis is a global sustainability consultancy operating seven distinct digital products — each built independently, each with its own design language, navigation patterns, and UI components. The result was a fragmented experience: inconsistent interfaces, poor accessibility, and no shared foundation to build from.
When marketing introduced new brand guidelines, it crystallised what the product team already knew: a unified digital experience wasn't a nice-to-have. It was overdue.
The question was how to get there without grinding seven product teams to a halt.
Goal
To create a visually consistent, unified, and accessible experience across Anthesis' seven digital products, driven by the introduction of new brand guidelines and the need to move away from siloed, inconsistent development.
The longer-term ambition behind it was to consolidate all seven products into a single unified platform with a cohesive design language.
My Role
I led a global design team on the design system initiative end-to-end — facilitating workshops across design and engineering, defining governance, and working closely with development to ensure real-world implementability. A key early decision was anchoring the system in Bootstrap, the framework our developers already used, giving us immediate buy-in and a realistic delivery timeline.
Define
Understanding the Scope of Variation
Across seven products we had accumulated a significant debt of inconsistency: competing navigation patterns, misaligned grid systems, and dozens of component variants that had evolved independently to solve the same problems in different ways.
I ran a structured design audit in Miro, bringing designers and developers together in focused sessions organised by component group. In each session we laid out all existing implementations side by side, evaluated them against Bootstrap defaults and the new brand guidelines, and agreed on the canonical solution going forward. Having the right people in the room meant decisions stuck.
Build
A System With Developer DNA
With Bootstrap as the technical foundation, our UI Designer built out the component library in Figma in parallel with the audit sessions — updating it in real time as decisions were made. Nothing sat in a backlog.
The system covered colour tokens, typography, spacing, interactive components, and usage documentation for designers and developers alike. The Bootstrap alignment meant developers were implementing something they already understood, with a cleaner structure and consistent naming.
Deliver
A Shared Foundation for the Future
The design system shipped as a living document — a single source of truth any team could reference, contribute to, and build from.
It eliminated the need to design or build the same component multiple times across products, and laid the groundwork for a longer-term consolidation toward a unified platform. That future state is now achievable in a way it wasn't before.
Outcomes
Faster delivery — Reusable components reduced time spent designing and building UI from scratch
Consistent experience — Users encounter the same patterns and visual language across all seven products
Improved usability — Familiar, predictable patterns lower cognitive load
Cross-functional alignment — Designers and developers share a common language, reducing handoff friction
Commercial impact — Laid the foundation for a single unified platform, enabling Anthesis to cross-sell across their full product suite