Pilot

The situation

Pilot is a fast-growing nightlife ticketing and event platform in Texas. It runs premium nights end to end, from guest lists and payments to post-event media, for brands, venues and agencies. It was selling into enterprise and scaling faster than its design could keep up.

Five things were slowing it down:

• No senior design leadership, so decisions stalled or bounced to engineering
• A patchy component library, so each new feature felt like a different product
• A brand that lived in marketing guidelines but not in the product
• Engineers re-building patterns with no single source of truth, piling up bugs
• No motion language, so the UI felt static and unfinished

What we did

We joined on our subscription model, embedded with Pilot’s product and engineering teams over Slack, working in sprints. We treated the design system as two things at once: where the brand lives inside the product, and the engine that lets a small team ship at scale.

• Foundations for type, color, spacing, grid and motion, built from the existing brand.
• A component library of accessible buttons, inputs, tables, modals and charts, with variants for enterprise needs.
• React components and Storybook stories developers could import and ship.
• Contribution guidelines, versioning and docs, so adoption stuck.
• Motion in Rive, Blender 3D and Lottie, shipped as part of the system.

One path from Figma tokens to Storybook to production. The same system powers the guest app and the venue dashboard.

The result

• Features shipped faster, because teams reused ready components.
• Engineering rework dropped once there was one source of truth.
• New features felt consistent in demos and sales cycles.
• The system now supports multiple products and enterprise customization.
• New designers and engineers ramped quickly on documented components.