Aerodynamic
Design System
Building Aeropay’s multi-product design system to unify shared components, color tokens, iconography, and product patterns across its product ecosystem.
Aerodynamic was built to create a shared foundation for Aeropay’s growing product ecosystem: the pay app, Aerosync, the merchant portal, and various internal tools. I partnered with Piotr Hanula, one of our senior engineers, to bring more structure and consistency to products that were changing quickly and needed to scale.
What happens when a product suite grows faster than its shared foundation?
Aerodynamic helped unify Aeropay’s product suite around shared color tokens, iconography, and core components. But as the company grew, the products kept changing faster than the system could be maintained. New Aerosync components were created outside the system, dark mode was developed as a product-specific need, and updates from other teams were not consistently pushed back into Aerodynamic.
Without a dedicated design system team, clear ownership model, or contribution process, the challenge became less about building the system and more about maintaining parity between design and development.
We created a shared foundation for Aeropay’s product suite: color tokens, iconography, typography, core components, form patterns, and reusable interface decisions. Aerodynamic was not only a Figma library. It existed as a product surface: a dashboard where teams could access system guidance, components, and implementation resources.
One of the biggest wins was adoption. We rolled products into the system and used it as the foundation for real product work across the pay app, Aerosync, the merchant portal, and various internal tools. This gave the product suite a more consistent baseline and created a shared language between design and engineering.
As the products grew, product-specific needs started to outpace the shared system. Aerosync needed bank-linking patterns, client customization, OAuth and non-OAuth flows, and eventually dark mode. Some of those needs fit Aerodynamic. Others needed a product-level layer.
The next evolution was a more layered model: Aerodynamic as the shared core, with product-level components living closer to the products they served. This would have kept the system stable at the foundation while giving individual products room to evolve.
Aerodynamic gave the product suite a shared foundation, and revealed what it would take to scale one.
Aerodynamic helped bring more consistency and clarity to Aeropay’s product suite. Products were rolled into the system, teams aligned around shared tokens and iconography, and designers and developers had a stronger foundation for building new experiences.
Even as product-specific work continued to evolve outside the system, Aerodynamic still shaped the visual and interaction language across the suite. Aerosync continued to use the same color tokens, iconography, and many shared components, even when new product needs like dark mode and client customization moved faster than the system itself.
Aerodynamic showed what was possible with a small designer-developer partnership, and it also made the next challenge visible: design systems need maintenance, ownership, and a structure that matches the pace of the products they support.
It succeeded as a foundation. Its next evolution needed to be operational.