Arctic Base

A Five Year Case Study in Building a Scalable E Commerce Design System

Overview

Arctic Base is the design system that transformed how our team creates e commerce experiences. What began as an attempt to stop rebuilding the same elements became a multi year initiative that reshaped our workflow, improved collaboration with developers, and allowed us to deliver higher quality work with greater efficiency.

This piece documents how we built it, what we learned, and how it continues to evolve.

The Challenge

For years every new project began the same way. Designers rebuilt core screens, components and documentation from scratch. Most of our time was spent on repetitive production work instead of discovery, strategy and solving real customer problems.

We needed a system that gave designers a strong starting point while still allowing custom creative solutions. Templates felt counterintuitive for bespoke work, but over time we learned that a flexible base system actually supports creativity instead of reducing it. It removes unnecessary work and gives the team space to focus on what clients truly value.

Arctic Base was created to meet that need.

2019: Early Foundations

In 2019 we moved from Sketch and InVision to Figma. The shift to shared libraries and centralized styles opened the door to reusable templates for the first time.

At this stage, our team was made up of generalists. Everyone held the same title and worked across UX, UI, and prototyping. We were productive but lacked structured processes and a shared understanding of platform constraints. We could see the potential of a system, but we did not yet have the language for it.

The Turning Point: Design and Development Alignment

As projects grew more complex, friction between designers and developers increased. Designers created solutions based only on client requests, sometimes without understanding platform limitations. Developers then had to make everything work within a fixed flat rate budget.

To close the gap, we identified four priorities that ultimately became the backbone of Arctic Base:

1. Designer created documentation on platform functionality.

2. Clearer guidance for clients on possibilities, limitations and cost impact.

3. Templates that mirrored the developer starter environments.

4. Research backed e commerce UX standards to support confident decision making.

2020: Skills, Structure and Clarity

We invested in extensive e commerce UX training through the Baymard Institute and earned team wide certifications. This gave us a shared research foundation and a more objective way to make decisions.

We also introduced role specialization by separating UX and UI. This allowed the team to split responsibilities and work more intentionally. UX designers began creating platform documentation and building system aligned wireframes.

This year established the groundwork for everything that followed.

2021: Naming the System

In 2021 we formally entered the world of design systems and finally had a name for what we had been building. We called it Arctic Base, inspired by a research outpost where designers explore, test patterns and gather data.

We also learned an important lesson. We assigned three new junior designers to build the first version of the component library as a training exercise. While they did an excellent job with what they had, most of the system later needed to be rebuilt. The experience helped us understand the skills required to maintain a system properly.

2022: Bringing Documentation Into the Design File

Our next challenge was unifying documentation and design. Developers relied on documents that did not always match the Figma files.

We created an annotation system integrated directly into our components and templates. This allowed designers to explain behavior, states and platform nuances in context. The shift increased accuracy and made collaboration with developers much smoother.

2023: Full System Adoption

By 2023 Arctic Base was used across all e-commerce projects. Full adoption brought many lessons. A memorable example was a file accidentally delivered with bright pink input fields for a high-end Scandinavian furniture brand. Thankfully, our QA process caught it, and the event strengthened our guardrails and component controls.

This year also aligned the wider company around better practices.

• We shifted from flat rate pricing to hourly billing, improving transparency.

• We introduced required UX and dev feasibility reviews.

• We increased remote collaboration using walkthrough videos, structured agendas and whiteboard sessions.

These improvements supported the design system and made high-quality work more sustainable.

2024: A Mature System

By 2024 the core of Arctic Base was fully established. Our focus shifted to refining and expanding it.

• We updated patterns to match new Figma capabilities.

• We added templates for Tailwind UI and Next.js builds.

• We improved components as our project library grew.

We also noticed that design system maintenance is its own skillset. Some designers loved working on structure and documentation. Others preferred branding, animation or content heavy creative work. We reorganized responsibilities so each designer could focus on what they do best.

The solid foundation of Arctic Base allowed us to expand our services into custom apps, themes, branding packages and rapid turnaround solutions.

2025: AI Supported Maintenance and Future Ready Systems

In 2025 we introduced AI supported auditing tools into our workflow. These tools helped us flag accessibility issues, inconsistencies and edge cases that are easy to miss manually.

At the same time we saw a shift in client work toward headless architectures and SaaS products. Years of system thinking prepared us well for this moment because we already had the processes needed to create scalable and flexible design frameworks.

Arctic Base now supports a wider range of products and continues to evolve with new technologies.

Outcome

Arctic Base began as a way to reduce repetitive work. It grew into a foundation that improved our process, increased quality, strengthened collaboration and expanded our capabilities as a team.

A design system is never truly finished. It grows with technology, with people and with the needs of clients. Arctic Base continues to evolve, but its greatest impact has already been made. It gave us the space and structure to do our best creative work.