A Design System for legacy tools
B2B • Design System • Enterprise
I proposed and built Zelo, a design system with roughly 50 components for the web. I made sure everything worked inside Divi (the WordPress builder the company used). Then, I documented the entire system on a public style guide website.
Overview
At INTS, the lack of standard, reusable components caused severe drift in brand consistency. The website and social posts often featured entirely different visual styles, buttons, and layouts. The team simply lived with the daily friction because nobody had formally recognized this operational drag as a solvable problem.
Services
Web Designer
Branding
Creative Direction
Role
Main Designer
Plataform
Web
The Problem
The team recreated assets from scratch every time. As a result, brand consistency drifted across formats.
Old INTS website (top) vs on Print Material (bottom)
Main constraint
Everything had to work in Divi 4/Wordpress, the tool they already used.
Central Challenge
How to build a cohesive design system that non-technical teams can successfully adopt and implement within a rigid legacy tool?
Consequence
Design a vastly simplified, highly constrained component library exclusively tailored to work natively inside Divi for non-developers.
Retrospective
The Zelo Style Guide was published and still stands live today as an ongoing artifact.
What Improved
I successfully built and standardized roughly 50 core components. Using Zelo, I was able to quickly ship new INTS website pages (e.g., the research ethics committee page) pulling from the component library instead of starting raw.
What Worsened
Three months into the process, I was relocated to another priority project before properly training the team on the system. Although leadership bought into Zelo, the actual end-users never fully adopted the system after I departed.
What I would do differently
- Sell the system directly to the people using it, demonstrating exactly how it actively eliminates their painful, daily tasks (like constantly rebuilding buttons).
- Enforce hands-on training sessions with the team members prior to jumping into a new project, rather than assuming a published document was sufficient for adoption.
