I built IBM's Figma foundation — and learned what makes a kit teams actually use.
IBM's move from Sketch to Figma left Carbon for IBM Products without a kit. I led a team of 10 to build it from scratch — 30+ components and 165% adoption growth in five months. I also wrote the guides, made the videos, and ran the community feedback loop that got people to actually use it.
A design system nobody uses is just a file. This project taught me that adoption comes from teaching — explaining the tool, answering the questions, making it easy to get started. That instinct is what I'd bring to advocacy work: not just deep Figma expertise, but knowing how to put it in front of people in a way that actually lands — and how to track whether it did.
The story
The challenge
IBM's move from Sketch to Figma meant Carbon for IBM Products needed a complete Figma kit — fast. Without one, design delivery would halt for thousands of designers. There was no kit and no team assigned to build one. I pulled together a team of 10 product designers — none of them design systems specialists, all volunteering time alongside their day jobs. Quality and speed were both non-negotiable.
Carbon 11 — the next major version of the design system — was already underway as we built. We needed kits for both versions to support teams transitioning at different times.
How we built it
The foundation wasn't just the components — it was the token layer underneath them. We mapped every component to Carbon's design token architecture using Figma variables, so colour and typography were driven by tokens rather than hardcoded values. That kept design and code in sync, enabled theme switching, and made the kit fast to evolve as the system changed.
Getting the library into designers' hands required more than shipping it. I wrote best-practice blogs, recorded video tutorials on theme switching and enabling the right libraries, and ran an open GitHub issue tracker so teams could flag problems and request components. I also spoke publicly about the project to encourage other designers to take on initiatives like this. That feedback loop shaped every iteration.
The result
Launched in July 2022, the kit reached 12,848 weekly component inserts by December — a 165% growth in usage over five months. Designers across IBM Software had a trusted Figma foundation from day one of the migration. The library has evolved since, but is still used daily by product teams.
