Velocity Design System:
Redefining Syntellis’ brand identity and creating a scalable system
Overview
Timeline: Sep 2020 - Jun 2021
BRAND STRATEGY
VISUAL IDENTITY
DESIGN SYSTEMS THINKING
As part of the team that created Syntellis’ centralized design system, I contributed to transforming a fragmented legacy ecosystem into a cohesive, modern brand foundation.
By helping define visual language and design principles, our work ensured the brand delivered consistent, intentional experiences across marketing, product, and customer touchpoints, supporting increased adoption, engagement, and long-term brand clarity.
The challenge.
Prior to Velocity, Syntellis’ products were designed in silos, with each suite developing its own design language. This resulted in inconsistent patterns, interactions, and user experiences, diluting the brand and undermining Syntellis’ position as a modern, data-driven technology company. Internally, these fragmented systems created friction across teams and slowed production and delivery.
I was brought onto Velocity alongside a Senior Visual Designer to help reposition Syntellis as a cohesive, modern platform by establishing a scalable design foundation that unified experiences across all products.
To first understand the challenge, I compiled a visual inventory audit of different customer touch-points across Syntellis to track inconsistencies, pain points, and areas of opportunity for the redesign.
Design System Goal.
Our goal for creating a design system came in two-folds:
We want to unify design and interaction patterns across product suites to strengthen brand consistency. We hypothesized by doing so, this would increase customer adoption and improve current customer satisfaction.
We aimed to increase internal design and development velocity across teams, in doing so this will help engineering teams with eliminating need for creating custom code, and speed up product development cycles.
Research & Discovery.
Partnering with Concrete, a third party research agency, we identified key personas across products and uncovered opportunities to standardize patterns, improve accessibility, and strengthen visual hierarchy.
Design Strategy.
I worked with our Lead Visual Designer to create a design strategy roadmap and split this massive undertaking into milestones and timelines: color mapping, grid system, typography, components, documentation. We wanted to build a new language that Syntellis’ customers would be excited about, and this started with foundational knowledge of the customers that would translate to tone and voice of the products.
I orchestrated brainstorming sessions with healthcare PMs and engineering partners to answer questions related to the customer persona, and ensure feasibility and alignment across all products. Together we established guidelines, and system principles focused on scalability and flexibility.
Ideation.
Ideation for this project was iterative - we referenced other companies such as IBM’s Carbon Design that had a look and feel we were trying to achieve, and played around with design elements that help reinforce Syntellis’ branding and push the boundaries from its legacy designs.
We would build upon the components by first building the atoms, to molecules, molecules to organisms and eventually templates that we could scale out to different product suites to make sure the look and feel was not only cohesive, but scalable.
Design & Validation.
I led the component scaling process across product suites, building from foundational elements to reusable templates.
We validated our approach by running a validation study using Microsoft’s Desirability Toolkit. The findings helped validate the new design system we created would help improve customers’ perception of Syntellis over the current interface, reinforcing our design direction.
The Solution.
The Velocity Design System launched in Q1 2021, introducing a unified, modular framework that connected marketing, product, and customer experiences.
In partnership with the Marketing team, we developed comprehensive guidelines across tone and voice, typography, grid systems, and layout principles, establishing the foundation not only for the design system but for Syntellis’ broader branding. The system included reusable components, a consistent visual language, and robust documentation, enabling faster, more aligned collaboration between design and development while ensuring brand consistency at scale.
“Now I get my reports in 15–20 seconds instead of hours.”
IMPACT
“This new system will probably save me a week’s worth of work.”
After launching Velocity Design System, we saw the design system delivery measurable results
Velocity Design System was quickly adopted across 20+ products, delivering measurable results:
+9% revenue growth and +2% customer satisfaction in the first year of launch
Brand, design and identity alignment across central teams
Increased velocity across engineering teams, reducing time to ship new features
Designers can spend the time that was used on building components to focus on innovation