BUILT IN FRAMER
2026 rights
Orbital
A design system and component library for a research org that ships ten products a year.
role
Design lead
year
Client
Orbital Labs
tags
Design systems, Website, Animation
the brief
Orbital Labs came to me with a product that worked but didn't feel like anything in particular. We spent two weeks finding a metaphor money as a shape, drafts as a stack of cards, a research notebook that travels offline and the rest of the engagement turning that metaphor into a coherent surface.
What I shipped
A redrawn information architecture that cut top-level destinations from eleven to four.
A type system tuned to the product's reading rhythm (long for body, short for labels).
A small component library, documented in plain English, used by three engineers daily.
Brand-adjacent surfaces onboarding, empty states, error pages written with the founder.
What I would improve
Start the metaphor work earlier, even when the team is impatient for screens. Every week we spent on naming things saved a month of arguing about pixels.