Granicus Design System

Granicus(Govt tect) modernizes the Government Experience in countries like US/UK/Australia

Overview

At Granicus, I spearheaded the evolution of the company’s design system — shaping its visual language, establishing scalable foundations, and fostering a collaborative design culture. My work centers around defining a strategic roadmap to guide the system’s maturity and aligning cross-functional teams toward a unified design vision.

Problem

Granicus’ growing suite of products faced challenges in maintaining design consistency, documentation clarity, and alignment between design and engineering. Without a structured roadmap or defined governance model, teams often duplicated efforts, resulting in inefficiencies and visual inconsistencies across digital touchpoints. As there are multiple products where government provided service to the users/citizen there was lack of consistency and scalability.

Approach

Defined a strategic roadmap to guide the design system’s evolution — outlining milestones for component expansion, documentation improvement, and adoption strategy.

• Audited existing design assets to identify gaps and redundancies, ensuring a cohesive and scalable component library.

• Refined visual language foundations — color, type, spacing, and interaction patterns — to reflect brand alignment and accessibility standards.

• Established stronger cross-functional workflows by collaborating with developers, product teams.

• Mentored designers through iterative feedback loops, improving design quality, documentation consistency, and cross-team engagement.

• Introduced feedback mechanisms and contribution models to build a healthy, transparent design system culture.

• We were also looking into MCP. Where the Figma MCP comes into picture approach to reduce development effort using cursor.

• Newsletters were also published for all the team member to follow the updates in Design System.

  

• Processes were created for all the designer to use for how to use layer naming, component creation, variable application etc.

• Figma sites were also taken into consideration to reduce the development documentation cost of development and replication. Currently a developer needs to replicate the documentation in platforms like Confluence, Gitbook, Notion etc.

Outcome

Elevated Granicus’ visual identity through a cohesive and scalable design system framework.

• Improved cross-functional alignment, reducing redundancy and streamlining design-to-development collaboration.

• Strengthened the design system’s maturity, laying the groundwork for a long-term governance and adoption model.

• Cultivated a collaborative design culture, empowering team members to contribute, experiment, and evolve the system together.