Background

FTI Touristik, a Munich-based tour operator founded in 1983, offered a wide range of travel products across 120 countries and five continents.

After 40 years of generating 95% of its revenue through offline sales, the company decided to strengthen its digital presence. To support this shift, we created a robust design system named Sunscreen; a foundation for delivering consistent, accessible, and engaging digital experiences

<aside> 💔 FTI Touristik GmbH filed for insolvency on June 1st, and work on the Design System and other products has stopped.

</aside>

My Role

As a Senior Product Designer, I led the creation of Sunscreen, FTI’s first design system. I guided the strategy and direction of the system while also being fully involved in the design work. Our squad included three designers, three engineers, and one product owner. Within this setup, I led the designers and worked closely with engineers and the PO to align decisions, drive initiatives, and ensure the system could scale.

Alongside this, I was hands-on throughout: defining principles, establishing the foundation, and crafting components and documentation from the early stages to production.

Key contributions:

• Drove strategy and collaboration by leading 3 designers and working cross-functionally with engineers and a product owner, aligning decisions and initiatives across the squad.
• Standardized foundations with design tokens, improving scalability, accessibility, and ease of maintenance.
• Introduced a structured Figma workflow with file organization, naming conventions, and status indicators, which improved collaboration and clarity across the team.
• Crafted and prototyped global components (Quick-Search, Header Navigation) through cross-team workshops, enabling adoption across products, earlier stakeholder validation, and smoother developer handoff.
• Built documentation in Zeroheight with Storybook integration, creating a single source of truth for 6+ product teams.

Challenges

FTI’s website before redesign

When we began, the design team was brand new. There were no files, no existing pattern library, and no prior design processes to build on. This meant starting entirely from scratch. Within the Design System Squad, our challenge was to build a scalable system without a clear vision of the upcoming product. We had to rely on assumptions to create the very first version of components and to establish initial design principles.

Key challenges:

• No existing component library. Everything had to be created from the ground up.
• Accessibility issues. More than 60% of the current palette failed WCAG standards.