Building Inside Someone Else's System

A full digital brand redesign, with a design system at the centre of it all.

Banco BiG is a Portuguese investment bank. The goal was a full digital rework of their universe (website and web app) with the primary focus on modernising the visual language across both and bringing everything under one coherent system. This wasn’t a refresh, it was a ground-up rethinking of how the brand lived digitally.

When I joined this project, six months of UX work had already happened without me. The research was done, direction set, system starting to take shape. My job was to come in, get up to speed fast, and contribute without slowing anything down. What made it interesting was that this was also my first real experience working inside a proper design system. Not a component kit, not a shared Figma file everyone agreed to call a system, but something genuinely being used as a live reference by both design and engineering.

Most of my time went into building: components, page layouts, templates across the product suite. But the more valuable thing that happened on this project was learning how that kind of collaboration actually works:

Weekly syncs with engineering where both sides defined the week's work together.

No design decision that engineering didn't know about.

No engineering assumption that design hadn't signed off on.

It was a welcome change from the rapid delivery cycles of agency work, allowing for a more strategic, research-driven design process.

Spain went live (check it out with the button below). Portugal was still on the old design when I moved off the project. That's the honest version of the outcome – partial, but what went live was solid and the system behind it was built to keep going.