Projects / Bespoke
Overview
Bespoke was Anywhere Real Estate's design system, serving a 22-person UX organization across enterprise and consumer products. Over two years, I worked across all three phases of its lifecycle: the initial audit that gave the incoming design lead data to build from, the ongoing maintenance and expansion of the system, and the pattern migration that brought reusable work back into the shared library. My contributions spanned component design, brand and icon design, color theming across seven brands, documentation, and the organizational processes that kept the system and team aligned.
My contribution
Product designer II
Visual designer
Documentation
Change management
The team
1x lead designer
1x product designer
1x accessibility designer
3x front-end engineers
The problem
Before Bespoke existed, Anywhere Real Estate had multiple design systems across its products with no shared guidelines. Components were built without governance, accessibility issues were common, and implementation varied widely across teams. Designers had full freedom to create, but no shared foundation to build from. The cost of that freedom was inconsistency at scale.
Phase 1
Before a lead designer was hired, a group of five designers, including me, conducted audits across all products to identify the most-used components and provide the incoming DS lead with data to start building from. Each pod designer audited their own product. I was part of the group that compiled the findings. I also volunteered to lead the font analysis, researching options, documenting findings, and presenting a comparison table to help the team make an informed decision together.
Phase 2
When the lead designer joined and launched Bespoke with an initial set of components representing roughly 70% of the current system, pushback came quickly. Many designers felt the system was too restrictive; what they were really describing was the loss of ungoverned freedom. To lower the learning curve, I leaned on established methodologies from large companies' design systems. Familiar patterns reduced resistance better than persuasion did.
I contributed to the Figma component libraries, ran token updates, led elevation studies, and initiated dark mode as a standalone project. I created themes for seven brands using a color scale methodology I developed, then replaced it with Material's opacity-based state system when the original proved too slow to replicate.
I managed a 40+ icon library of custom icons built to match the Material Icon Library style, created the Bespoke logo and visual language for the documentation site, and helped build the site from the ground up, including the IA, graphics, and page content. With no copywriter on the team, I used AI for content throughout.
On the organizational side, I ran office hours, answered questions from product and engineering teams, and built a change management process before the documentation site launched. A design system is a product, and with only two core contributors, we needed a way to manage requests without becoming a bottleneck.
The change process helped us evaluate what was needed, and when designers already had research supporting a request, it gave them a path to contribute directly. Building that structure proactively was one of the things I'm most proud of.
Phase 3
As the system matured, product teams had built patterns using existing Bespoke components. These patterns were living in individual product files rather than the shared library, which meant other teams couldn't reuse them without rebuilding from scratch, duplicating work at both the design and engineering level.
I worked with the lead of each pod to identify which patterns were worth migrating. Not everything qualified. The criteria were how frequently a pattern appeared across products and whether it solved a problem that multiple teams had independently identified. If different teams had built the same solution without knowing about each other, that would have been a strong signal that the pattern belonged in the shared library.
From there, I audited each qualifying pattern, rebuilt where needed to match Bespoke's style and naming conventions, and created Jira tickets so developers could incorporate them into the code library.
What I learned
A design system is only as strong as the organization's willingness to maintain it. The hardest part of this work was never the components. It was helping people understand why consistency has value when freedom feels easier. The change process I built before it was needed, the office hours I ran when no one else was around, and the migration I finished without being asked are the parts of this project that matter most to me. If the system is working and all teams are moving forward, we're doing our jobs.
