Frosty UI
How We Built Frosty UI: A Scalable Design System for Antarctica Global
Prologue
The Chaos Before the Order
Designing at speed is great—until it isn’t. At Antarctica Global, every project started with fresh ideas and endless iterations, but soon, inconsistencies piled up, designs felt disconnected, and development slowed down.
Developers had to manually inspect every detail—from mismatched colors to inconsistent spacing—wasting time fixing instead of building. Without a system in place, every iteration felt like starting from scratch, and the design debt just kept growing.
Why Frosty UI?
She's our mascot!
Without a structured design system, we ran into three major roadblocks:
Design debt kept piling up
Frequent iterations meant constantly revisiting and fixing old designs, slowing down progress.
Inconsistencies everywhere
Colors, buttons, and typography lacked uniformity, making designs feel disconnected.
Slow handoffs & dev confusion
Developers had to manually inspect every element, leading to delays and inconsistencies.
We needed a structured, scalable design system to bring order, efficiency, and consistency to our workflow.
Research
Learning from the Best
Before diving into building Frosty UI, I drew inspiration from Brad Frost’s Atomic Design, which breaks UI into reusable building blocks, ensuring scalability.
I also studied Material Design, Polaris, and Fluent, focusing on documentation, consistency, and developer handoff best practices. These insights shaped Frosty UI into a structured, future-proof system that balanced flexibility and clarity.
The Solution
Frosty UI – A Bridge Between Design & Development
Our mission was simple: standardize our design language, improve efficiency, and create a seamless bridge between Figma and code.
Goal 1: Unified Design Language
We set out to build a cohesive design system that ensured consistency across all products, defining typography, color schemes, and components that reinforced our brand identity and improved usability.
Goal 2: Creating Reusable Components
We built a library of reusable components to streamline design and speed up workflows, ensuring versatility and adaptability across different products.
Leveraging Components & Variants
The Power of Auto Layout
Goal 3: Clear Documentation
To eliminate confusion, we created detailed style guides in Figma, with annotations explaining color usage, typography, spacing, and interactions. Everything was clearly documented, making handoffs seamless.
Challenges & Iterations
Design Systems need to be constantly worked on aiming to perfect scalability
Retrofitting Old Designs
Some screens were designed before implementing the design system. Updating everything to align with Frosty UI was a time-consuming process, but it ensured long-term consistency.
Expanding the Color System
Our initial color states were too limited, leading to confusion. By adding a shade card to our color scale, we solved this problem effectively.
Developer Adoption
Getting engineers to follow the new system required training and adjustments. We held collaborative sessions to ensure a smooth transition.
Learnings
What Changed After Frosty UI?
• Designers may tend to bring bias to the table, but learning to remove that by making decisions based on data metrics is always the right way to go.
• Design Systems need to be constantly worked on aiming to perfect scalability. In big organizations, designing to scale is a challenge and design systems certainly help ease the load.
• It reinforced the importance of a unified design language, demonstrated the value of reusable components, and highlighted the impact of comprehensive design guidelines on efficiency and consistency.
