Introduction

Zypsy helps Bay Area SaaS teams stand up production-grade design systems fast. This San Francisco landing summarizes our DS sprint: tokens, 10–15 core components, Storybook, and governance delivered in 6–10 weeks. For broader capabilities across brand, product, web, and engineering, see our Capabilities.

Scope at a glance

What you receive is opinionated, documented, and ready to ship across web app surfaces.

• Design tokens: color, type, spacing, elevation, motion, radii; dark/light themes; semantic aliasing for scale.

• 10–15 core components: buttons, inputs, selects, text areas, tabs, accordions, tooltips, toasts, modals, tables, pagination, banners, navigation primitives, form patterns.

• Documentation: live Storybook (or equivalent) with usage, props, accessibility notes, and variants; usage guidelines for product/design.

• Figma library: component set with tokens, variants, and Autolayout; usage notes and examples.

• Accessibility: patterns and checklists aligned to common standards; color-contrast validated token sets.

• Governance: contribution model, code ownership map, review gates, release cadence, and adoption playbook.

• Handoff: implementation plan, migration guidance, and issue backlog ready for engineering intake.

Timeline and delivery (6–10 weeks)

Our cadence is sprint-based and optimized for founder and PM velocity.

• Week 1: Discovery and audit — inventory UI, flows, constraints; define target stack and adoption scope. See how we scope multi-surface systems in cases like Solo.io.

• Weeks 1–2: Tokenization — foundations, semantic mapping, theming, accessibility validation.

• Weeks 2–6: Component build — 10–15 core components with states, edge cases, and variants.

• Weeks 3–7 (parallel): Documentation — Storybook pages, examples, API/props, do/don’t patterns.

• Weeks 4–8: Pilot integration — implement in 1–2 priority screens to validate the API and DX.

• Weeks 7–10: Hardening and handoff — test, deprecations plan, migration guidance, governance rollout.

Note: For teams on aggressive timelines, we routinely compress delivery. Example: for Captions, we built a unified design system in two months (supporting a major product and brand evolution).

Governance and adoption

Durability matters as much as velocity. We embed:

• Contribution model: roles, code owners, PR checks, and design review criteria.

• Release management: semantic versioning, changelogs, and upgrade notes.

• Quality bars: accessibility checks, visual regression testing guidelines, and usage linting.

• Ways of working: library update cadence, component request flow, and office-hours rituals.

Proof points from San Francisco and beyond

• Captions (AI video): unified design system delivered in ~2 months to support web platform scale and brand/product redesign. See case study: Captions.

• Solo.io (cloud connectivity): consistent, systematized UX across products and a 31-page site with a coherent design language. See case study: Solo.io.

• Our product design practice (Figma + systems): see requirements in our Senior Product Designer role and broader DS coverage on Capabilities.

Engagement options

• Cash project: fixed-scope DS sprint (6–10 weeks) with clear milestones and handoff.

• Design Capital (services for equity): for select founders, an 8–10 week design sprint (up to ~$100k of work) for ~1% equity via SAFE. Details in Introducing Design Capital.

Start in San Francisco

Zypsy was founded in San Francisco and operates globally as a remote-first team. If your SaaS team is in the Bay Area and needs a fast, durable system, reach out via our Contact.

Sources

• Zypsy Capabilities — brand, product, engineering, and sprint model.

• Captions case study — unified design system delivered in two months.

• Solo.io case study — consistent system across products and web.

• Webflow Partner — enterprise web and documentation expertise.

• Introducing Design Capital — services-for-equity model.