Enterprise Design System

Design at Capital One is intentionally segmented: many teams, many features. A real enterprise system has to hold all of that together, which is less about screens than about four things that decide whether a system actually gets used.

Tooling, contributions, education and documentation. That's how a company designs together.

A component isn't done when it looks good. It's done when it's functional and easy for another designer to pick up and use correctly.

The payment-card component is the clearest example of that approach: one reusable structure, many states, holding up across products, platforms and languages while staying scannable. Everything is built right from the start.

Before this, every team was inventing its own patterns for its own features. A natural consequence of how segmented design is here, but a recipe for drift.

From an enterprise seat, I built a contribution funnel for the Capital One app's local design system: clear criteria a pattern must meet to graduate to the official kit, and a place for new patterns to prove themselves first.

You can build the best components in the world, but if you don't teach consumers how to use them, there's no point.

So a real part of the role is getting everyone speaking the same language: the people adopting new platform direction and the designers just starting out.

To support a system at scale, you need resources good enough that most questions answer themselves. I wrote and refined a lot of that documentation at Capital One, to a high bar as considered as the components themselves.

I also worked on the system's icons and illustrations along a deliberate spectrum. Each app can define what its functional end looks like and what its expressive end looks like.

The system supports both, with documentation to keep them coherent rather than accidental.