An all-in-one platform for premium nights.
Pilot powers premium guest experiences end to end, from guest lists and payments to post-event media, connecting brands, venues, and agencies with the tools and insight to run a night. Fast-growing and selling into enterprise, they were scaling faster than their design maturity could keep up.
Design and delivery blockers, diagnosed.
Five problems that slowed shipping, raised bug counts, and blocked enterprise positioning.
No senior design leadership
Tradeoffs were ad-hoc, so decisions stalled or bounced to engineering, slowing delivery.
A fragmented design system
The library was incomplete and unreliable, so each new feature felt like a different product.
Brand didn't reach the product
Marketing guidelines weren't expressed as tokens or UI rules, weakening enterprise positioning.
Implementation drift
Engineers re-implemented patterns with no single source of truth, piling up bugs and design debt.
No motion language
The UI felt static and less premium, hurting perceived quality and engagement.
The design system as brand asset and scaling engine.
We partnered with Pilot under our subscription model, sprint-based and embedded with their product and engineering teams over Slack. Rather than treat design as a coat of paint, we treated the design system as two things at once: the place the brand lives inside the product, and the engine that lets a small team ship at scale.
- 01
Foundation first
Typography, color, spacing, grid, and motion principles, built from the existing brand rather than bolted on.
- 02
Component library
Modular, accessible components, buttons, inputs, selects, tables, modals, charts, with variants for responsiveness and enterprise customization.
- 03
Front-end integration
React components and Storybook stories developers could import and ship, not just Figma specs to reinterpret.
- 04
Process & ease of use
Contribution guidelines, versioning, release notes, and a documentation hub, so adoption stuck across teams.
- 05
Scalability built in
Tokens and component APIs designed up front to support new products and white-label / enterprise needs.
One token layer. Every surface on-brand.
Rive · Blender 3D · Lottie, shipped as tokens, not afterthoughts.
Buttons, inputs, tables, modals, charts — in React + Storybook.
Token-first, design straight to code.
One reliable path, so design intent flowed into shipped code instead of getting lost in handoff. Designers and engineers paired on components from day one and treated the system as a shared source of truth. Motion shipped as a first-class citizen too: responsive Rive animations, Blender 3D, and Lottie.
Find the night. Book the table. Done.
On the system, the guest app leads with feel: discover venues by mood and music, see who's on tonight, then go from a gradient-lit event page to a chosen table and tickets in your pocket, in a handful of taps. It's your night.
Home → venue → event → table → tickets. The whole night, in a few taps.
One dashboard to run the whole floor.
The same system powers a venue command center: a live table plan of the actual room, booked-table and VIP management, orders, ticket scanning at the door, and customer insights that tag regulars and big spenders. Reservations, revenue, and experience in one place instead of four.
What a real design system changed.
The system paid off across delivery, quality, and how the product showed up in enterprise sales.
Faster velocity
Features shipped faster because teams reused production-ready components instead of rebuilding the same UI.
Reduced rework
Engineering rework dropped as a single source of truth removed guesswork and reimplementation.
Consistency
Every new feature felt cohesive, strengthening the product's brand in demos and sales cycles.
Premium feel
Motion and interaction design lifted perceived quality and set the product apart from competitors.
Scalability
The system now supports multiple products and enterprise customization without piling up design debt.
Faster onboarding
New designers and engineers ramped quickly thanks to documented components, patterns, and clear governance.
A design system is not overhead. It's a growth multiplier.
Small teams scale
A real system lets a small design team scale alongside a much larger engineering org, without the quality falling apart.
Brand lives in the product
Tokens and components embed brand equity inside the product itself, not just the marketing site.
Measurable ROI
With the right governance it pays back in faster shipping, higher adoption, and lower churn.