Corpus Design system
Building structure, clarity, and trust in digital healthcare
Quin | Amsterdam 2021 - 2024
Context
Quin is a Dutch health tech company building digital tools that connect patients, GPs, and specialists. The goal: to make healthcare more accessible and efficient for everyone.
The challenge
Quin had six product teams working across multiple tools for both healthcare professionals and patients. Things were moving fast but often in silos. Design decisions were made on gut feeling, which looked great on their own but inconsistent as a whole. The platform needed higher quality, but the way it was built made it difficult to maintain. The result was fragmented workflows and inefficient design and development.
The goal
We needed a shared foundation that could scale across products, align teams, and support multiple themes. It also had to prepare Quin for white-label use across GP practices and hospital brands. Beyond structure, the goal was to free up time: less energy spent on repeating UI decisions, more on UX and innovation.
My role
I played a key role in the work on the design system. Together with a developer, I defined tokens, refined components, and set design-to-code standards that made our products consistent, accessible, and easier to build. I worked closely with designers and developers to bring it to life and scale the way of working across teams.
In this showcase, I have highlighted key deliverables and moments from that process.
Finding the friction
The work involved mapping design and development pain points, identifying redundancies and quality issues, and aligning on what the system needed to solve. Workshops with teams helped define priorities and set the direction for a more unified, scalable way of building products together.
Component audit: Found overlap, gaps, and inconsistencies.
Team feedback: Collected pain points from designers and developers.
Workshop: Aligned on what the system should solve and how to get there.
Setting the foundation
Building on what we learned, I worked with designers, developers, and PMs to define a framework everyone could rely on. Corpus gave structure to creativity and connected disciplines, tools, and decisions so teams could build with clarity and confidence.
Together we:
Created a structure for tokens, naming conventions, and component categories that fit real workflows
Ensured the system could scale with the pace of product development
Aligned design system priorities with broader product goals
Shared our approach across teams to grow understanding and adoption
Clarified the purpose of the system so it served every role in product development
Defined the anatomy that held components together and made them predictable
Built documentation that kept the system understandable and alive
Anatomy
The Corpus Design System, inspired by the term “corpus”—meaning the main body or structure—serves as the foundation for scalable, and user-centered product development. Just as a corpus provides structure and unity, our design system aligns teams across disciplines, enabling collaboration and consistency in creating meaningful user experiences.
Our goal was to bring everyone involved in product development together around clear standards and principles, driven by user needs and the business challenges we aimed to solve.
With the foundations in place, we defined, built, and systematically migrated every layer of the system in both design and code. Each token, component, and pattern was created with care for detail, accessibility, and quality. Everything was reusable, connected, and built to last and scale.
Reflection
Corpus became a turning point for Quin. It gave the company a shared language and a way to grow with consistency and intent. Getting everyone on board took time, but it built trust and changed how design and development worked together.
For me, it was a lesson in the power of early alignment and open communication. A design system is never finished. It grows with the people who use it. The real success of Corpus lives in how teams kept it alive and made it their own.