Case Study — KELLY TOKAS ©

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Eskimoz

Design System

I led the design of Eskimoz, a digital growth platform aimed at helping brands strengthen their visibility and performance across SEO, paid media, and content channels.

Problem

Eskimoz was entering a new stage of growth, backed by €17M in funding, but the product experience no longer reflected the maturity of the business or the sophistication of its SEO and SEA tooling. My role was not simply to refresh the interface, but to create a stronger foundation for scale by designing Polar, a modular design system that could bring consistency to the product, improve usability, and support faster collaboration between design and engineering.

The legacy design system and core UI components

Research

To understand where the friction was coming from, I approached the project as both a product and systems challenge rather than just a UI task. I audited the existing experience and mapped recurring interaction patterns across the platform to pinpoint exactly where users and internal teams were getting blocked.

Establishing a completely new, foundational visual language for the Polar Design System from the ground up

A scalable library of modal components designed to cover all key user flows and edge cases

Challenges

The core issue was that the interface had expanded organically over time without a clear system, creating a fragmented experience that made complex SEO and SEA workflows difficult to navigate. This lack of a shared design language was not only increasing cognitive load for the users but was also severely slowing down engineering delivery and multiplying UI-related technical debt.

A selection of button variants and interactive states defined for the Polar Design System

Checkbox groups configurations and variants built to scale

Key Solutions

I took full ownership of the strategic direction by architecting Polar, a modular design system built to bring consistency, clarity, and flexibility to the entire platform. Rather than treating the work as a one-off redesign, I focused on creating a unified visual language with reusable, reliable building blocks. This approach gave engineers a highly efficient framework for building at scale while helping users process dense data much more intuitively.

Scalable dropdown components designed to support complex data selection

A high-level view of the design system's core architecture and component taxonomy

Impact

The implementation of the Polar system produced measurable operational gains : just like faster feature delivery, UI-related bugs decreased by 30%, and user satisfaction improved. Beyond immediate delivery, the system severely reduced technical debt and dropped engineering onboarding time, allowing new hires to ship production-ready UI in their first week. Ultimately, this initiative repositioned design from a simple layer of polish into a strategic asset that actively supported Eskimoz’s scaling efforts.