Elio Quill — Design Systems Lead

Profile

Eleven years in practice

I build the shared language a product team designs in — tokens, type scales, components and the rules that keep them honest.

My work usually begins where a product has outgrown its first interface: several teams, several accents, no agreement on a heading. I map what already exists, keep what earns its place, and replace the rest with a documented system that designers and engineers can both read. Typography carries most of that weight, so I treat the type scale as infrastructure rather than decoration.

I write the front-end for the components I specify, which keeps the documentation truthful and the handoff short. Accessibility is part of the definition of done, not a late audit. I am most useful to teams who want a system maintained in the open, with contribution routes and a clear deprecation habit.

Selected work

Three projects

Ledger — design system for a regulated lender

2024–2026

Northbank Labs · Systems lead

Replaced four divergent component libraries with a single token-driven system covering forms, disclosure patterns and the long compliance copy that regulated products depend on. Built the contribution model, review rota and versioning policy alongside the components themselves.

OutcomeAdopted as the default toolkit across the lender's product teams, with pattern decisions recorded in a public changelog rather than settled in private threads.

Quarto — editorial publishing surface

2023

Meridian Type Co. · Lead designer & front-end

A reading and composition environment for a type foundry's journal: a fluid modular scale, specimen-aware article layouts, and an editor view that previews the same CSS the published page uses. Shipped as hand-written HTML and CSS with a small component layer.

OutcomeEditors now set long features without developer help, and the typographic rules live in one stylesheet shared by the journal and the foundry's catalogue.

Fieldwork — service blueprint and booking flow

2022

Halden Studio · Product designer

Mapped an equipment-hire service end to end, then redesigned the booking sequence around the two moments that actually caused drop-off: availability ambiguity and unclear collection terms. Delivered the blueprint, the flow and the accessible form patterns behind it.

OutcomeThe studio kept the blueprint as its reference artefact for later service work, and the form patterns became the base of its component set.

Experience

2015 – present

Design Systems Lead — Northbank Labs

2024–Present

Lisbon · remote

Own the design system: tokens, components, documentation, release notes and the review rota that keeps contributions moving.
Pair with platform engineers on the component implementations, and review production pull requests that touch shared UI.
Run a fortnightly open critique where product teams bring patterns before building them.

Senior Product Designer — Meridian Type Co.

2021–2024

Remote · type foundry

Led the foundry's catalogue, specimen and journal interfaces, including the fluid type scale used across all three.
Introduced an accessibility baseline for the catalogue and rewrote the specimen templates to meet it.
Mentored two designers through their first systems work.

Product Designer — Halden Studio

2018–2021

Client practice · services and logistics

Designed booking, scheduling and account flows for service businesses, from research through to built front-end.
Established the studio's handoff standard: annotated states, copy decks and a component inventory per project.

Designer & Front-end Developer — Independent practice

2015–2018

Publishers, galleries, small software teams

Built editorial sites and identity systems end to end, which is where the typographic habits in my current work were formed.

Capabilities

Practice · toolkit · languages

Practice

Design system governance
Type-led interface design
Accessibility to WCAG 2.2 AA
Design-to-code handoff
Research synthesis
Workshop facilitation

Toolkit

Figma variables and tokens
HTML and modern CSS layout
TypeScript component review
Storybook documentation
Token pipelines
Git-based review

Languages

English — fluent
Portuguese — conversational
Spanish — reading

Education

And continued training

MA Communication Design — Ravenhill School of Art

2015

Thesis: systems for editorial reading

BA Visual Communication — Ashgrove University

2013

Typography and print major

Typographic Systems intensive — Letterform Workshop

2019

Six-week evening programme