At Kitty, design systems are treated as a fundamental part of building high-performing websites, not an optional extra. Early in every project, the team defines consistent standards for typography, spacing, imagery, colours, layouts, and interface styling to ensure a cohesive experience across the entire site.
The process combines both UX and UI considerations. UX designers create detailed wireframes in Figma, focusing on information architecture, user behaviour, and intuitive interactions, while clients can review prototypes and provide direct feedback through multiple revision rounds. Once approved, UI designers apply branding, typography, imagery, and interactive elements such as micro-animations and parallax effects to create a more engaging and modern experience.
With both design and development teams based in-house in London, Kitty maintains full quality control, ensuring consistency, efficient collaboration, and faster support throughout the entire website build process.
We build comprehensive design systems from the ground up that define your digital brand standards. This includes component libraries, style guides, pattern documentation, and usage guidelines that ensure every designer and developer working on your site maintains absolute consistency.
Design systems must account for accessibility from the outset. We design to WCAG standards (2.0, 2.1, and 2.2), ensuring high contrast between text and backgrounds, avoiding text over images where possible, and incorporating functional considerations like adjustable font sizes. This isn’t just good practice, under the European Accessibility Act businesses selling products or services in the EU must make every effort to ensure their websites are accessible to everybody.
Whether you’re starting from scratch, refreshing an existing brand, or simply need proper documentation, we can create comprehensive brand guidelines that work across web, print, and outdoor applications. We’ve done this for clients like Cookson Adventures, developing their complete brand identity and guidelines from initial concept through to delivery.
Our design systems account for how your brand translates across devices, from desktop to tablet to mobile. We define breakpoints, scaling rules, and device-specific interaction patterns that maintain your brand integrity regardless of screen size.
We build reusable, modular components that speed up future development whilst ensuring consistency. Every repeated element is systematised and documented for efficient scaling as your site grows, think buttons, forms, cards, and navigation elements.
A well-implemented design system delivers measurable business benefits beyond visual consistency. By creating a predictable and intuitive user experience, it supports conversion rate optimisation (CRO), helping users navigate content more easily and reducing friction throughout the customer journey. This improved usability can directly increase engagement and conversions.
Design systems also make websites easier to maintain and scale. When new pages or features are needed, teams can build from established standards rather than starting from scratch, saving both time and development costs while ensuring consistency across the site. At the same time, documented design standards help protect brand identity by preventing inconsistent design decisions across internal teams or external partners.
From an SEO and generative engine optimisation (GEO) perspective, structured design systems improve discoverability through consistent information architecture, heading hierarchies, and organised content structures that search engines and AI tools can easily interpret. Kitty integrates SEO and GEO specialists into projects from the outset to ensure websites are optimised at a structural level.
Brand guidelines typically cover your logo usage, colour palette, typography, and general brand positioning. A design system is more comprehensive and digital-focused, it includes all those elements but also defines specific UI components, interaction patterns, spacing rules, grid systems, and responsive behaviours for web and app environments.
Absolutely. If you’ve got an existing site that’s grown organically without proper standards, we can audit what you have, identify inconsistencies, and document a design system that brings everything into alignment. This often forms part of our site stability and performance service.
Yes. Whether you’re building on WordPress, Shopify, or a headless architecture with Next.js, we create design systems that are platform-agnostic. The visual standards and components we define can be implemented across any technology stack.