I found the gaps in the system and filled them.
Working from within product squads, I identified recurring system gaps and authored 5+ components, patterns, and guidelines across core Carbon and Carbon for IBM Products — steering each through formal review into system-wide adoption.
Proves the ability to spot systemic gaps — including accessibility failures — in real product workflows and drive them through formal contribution. By promoting these solutions into Carbon core, they became official standards that improved how every team across the organization builds.
The contributions
Overview
Carbon is IBM's open-source design system. It sits at two levels: Carbon core sets the foundations; Carbon for IBM Products extends them for enterprise product teams.
Contributions work bottom-up — designers embedded in product teams spot gaps and propose changes through a formal process. If accepted, product-level fixes become system-level standards.
All of this work happened outside my day job as a visual designer embedded in product. I did it because I was passionate about design systems and wanted to make things that helped other designers work better.
Button guidance
The problem wasn't just how teams used buttons — it was missing functionality. Primary buttons were overused across products without clear hierarchy, and teams lacked patterns to group related actions cleanly.
I identified the core pain points, then recruited and led a small team to solve them. Beyond creating comprehensive button usage and hierarchy guidance, I designed and contributed two brand new components — Menu button and Combo button — to Carbon for IBM Products, defining their behavior, states, and documentation.
The guidance and components directly influenced Carbon's core system standards, turning product-level needs into shared, reusable assets across IBM.
Full page errors
Guidance for full page errors existed — but it had real problems. The illustrations were out of date, they didn't scale to smaller screens, and they didn't support dark mode, which was in active use across the entire Security portfolio. This meant teams either used inaccessible images or created something completely custom.
I led a small team to create new illustrations and updated guidance to help designers adopt full page errors more consistently.
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Tag overflow
There was existing guidance for tag sets, including how to overflow tags when there wasn't enough room on screen. But there was a gap: what about other elements that needed the same overflow behaviour?
I extended the existing guidance to cover those scenarios — adding user overflow and others, based on the needs of real products.
Grid influencers
Carbon's grid guidance covered the standard layout — but teams using the left-hand navigation component had no grid guidance or components that worked with it. This affected the majority of products.
I created detailed guidance and Figma assets for grid influencers: fixed UI elements that alter the available content area without disrupting the underlying grid structure.
The work was contributed upward and is now reflected in Carbon's core grid guidance — turning a product-level gap into a system-level standard.
