Problem & Approach.
NACDS's brand system needed to evolve from a loose collection of Adobe templates to a documented, queryable design system that members and vendors could ship against. I led the rebrand of NACDS Foundations — logo, color hierarchy, typography pairings, responsive online style guide — and codified the brand-wide patterns: heading scale, body type, three-tier color system, shadow library, button states, card treatments. The system lives in a Figma file as the visual source of truth, mirrored to a Markdown brand guide and a brand-assets folder for engineering reference.
Outcome.
Adopted across every collateral surface — print, web, email, signage. Reduced one-off design churn (no more 'what color is the dark navy?') and gave vendors a deterministic spec to build against. The discipline of running a real design system has informed everything since — Stratomation, Reblis.ai, even the trading bot dashboards reuse the same :root token + component spec pattern.