sr experience designer, ux
Designing intuitive experiences that quietly do the heavy lifting to make users feel like everything was built just for them—no chaos, no guesswork.
on the clock
off the clock
Timeline
Jan - Sep 2025
Scope
UI Design, Strategy
ask & task
The Chicago XD team saw an opportunity to jumpstart the design process and strengthen consistency across client projects. Designers were spending time setting up files from scratch instead of diving into creative exploration.
To solve this, we set out to create a Figma starter file built to give every designer an immediate head start. This would serve as a ready-made foundation with preconfigured variables, grids, components, and pages, allowing the team to move seamlessly from setup to design while maintaining alignment with best practices and client brand standards.
action
Our team collaborated closely to research, define, and build the starter file. UI Designers Alex Faiello and Parker Konz set up a series of weekly design workshops focused on different aspects of the Figma workflow. Each session examined how designers organized pages and sprints, documented creative direction, applied grids and breakpoints, managed naming conventions, used variables and styles, and prepared files for client sharing and handoff. These discussions surfaced shared challenges, revealed opportunities for alignment, and fostered collaboration across the Chicago UI team.
We synthesized our findings into a clear set of workflow standards and file best practices, creating guidelines that balanced efficiency with flexibility. Using these insights, we built the SPARK Starter File — a comprehensive, ready-to-use Figma system featuring preset variables and styles, structured page templates, and a modular component library built on atomic design principles. SPARK also includes image and icon wrappers with the Remix open-source icon set, responsive grid frameworks, and a connected style guide that ties directly to design tokens and variables, ensuring consistency from concept to delivery.
results
We officially launched SPARK to the Chicago XD team on October 7. Since then, it has been used for pitch work and quick design initiatives, streamlining project setup and accelerating delivery. The file has proven easy to customize and reuse, allowing designers to jump straight into creative execution without repetitive setup. We also introduced a feedback form to gather ongoing input from the Chicago XD team, ensuring SPARK continues to evolve and meet real design needs.
