Background

Sunscreen is the design system we built for FTI Touristik. This tour operator company, founded in 1983 in Munich, Germany, offers travel experiences in 120 countries across five continents. Its product ranges include beach holidays, cruises, modular trips, and more.

After 40 years, the company decided to transition to digital. Previously, over 95% of the company's revenue had been generated from offline sales. The goal was to enhance online sales by revamping our digital products.

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

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My Role

In this role, I acted as Design System Lead and led initiatives. ****I was responsible for setting the direction of the design system.

My responsibilities included overseeing the creation and updating of design components, enforcing design guidelines and standards, and coordinating with other product teams to ensure a consistent and unified user experience across all digital touchpoints.

• I standardized our foundational design decisions by establishing and integrating design tokens in collaboration with developers. This provided a high level of flexibility to the system and ease of maintenance in the future.
• I designed and prototyped core global components such as Quick-Search and Header Navigation, which were intended to be adopted across all products.
• I defined a structured approach for organizing files, pages, and components within Figma. I also collaborated with the team to set up and maintain Design System Documentation and its integration with Storybook on Zeroheight.

Challenges

With a bit of exaggeration, this is the old (non-redesigned) version of FTI

There were various challenges across the Design team as we were all just getting started. Since there was no prior design team, design files, or pattern library, we had to start building everything from scratch.

In the Design System Squad, the challenge was to build the Design System, without knowing anything from the potential new version of the product or having an early concept available. We had to start with assumptions to build the fundamental components and establish design principles.

The challenges were:

• No component/pattern library was existing
• Accesibility issues
• Inconsistencies in the existing product
• Inability to expand the product and its features due to design limitations