Applying Atomic Design to a Growing SaaS Platform

When I joined the startup, there were a few legacy design files and branding assets left over from earlier versions of the product. But for the most part, it was a clean slate. We were building a brand new version of our SaaS platform, and as the only UI/UX Designer and Engineer on a very small team, I had the opportunity to define the design system from the ground up.

Rather than inheriting an unmanageable Figma file, I was tasked with preventing one. The responsibility wasn’t to clean up what came before; it was to ensure we never ended up there again. I needed a framework that could support rapid iteration, enforce consistency, and scale as the product grew.

That’s when I turned to Brad Frost’s Atomic Design methodology. It gave me a modular approach to build components from the ground up, starting with foundational elements and layering them into increasingly complex patterns. The structure helped keep the system organized, maintainable, and easy to document.

Atomic Design breaks interfaces into five levels: atoms, molecules, organisms, templates, and pages. The idea is simple: start small and build upward. By defining the basics first (colors, typography, buttons), I could construct larger components confidently, knowing everything was connected and consistent.

Here’s how this played out inside our Figma system:

1. Atoms → The Building Blocks

Text styles, iconography, color swatches, spacing tokens, and button styles made up our atoms. Each category lived on its own dedicated Figma page, clearly labeled and organized to reflect its role in the system. Since everything was tokenized, updates to these foundational styles cascaded automatically to every higher-level component.

2. Molecules & Variants → Structured Reusability

Dropdowns, input fields, cards, tabs, and date pickers were all molecules constructed from atoms. These components often included multiple states or configurations, so organizing their variants within the same page made maintenance and discovery much easier. This layer became the core of interaction design, where structure and flexibility met.

3. Organisms & Variants → Systematizing Screens

Organisms were larger interface structures composed of multiple molecules. This included navigation bars, layout frameworks, grid systems, and flyouts. These components established the overarching structure of each screen and ensured consistency across complex workflows. Like with molecules, we documented key variants to support different contexts, screen sizes, and user states.

Organizing Documentation

In addition to making the system easier to scale and update, this structure made documentation significantly easier to maintain. By grouping components into the three levels (atoms, molecules, and organisms), I could mirror that hierarchy in our documentation system. Each component was documented within its atomic category, then further broken down by type, such as buttons grouped by size or function.

Defining allowed values for typography, color, corner radius, spacing, and states became straightforward and intuitive. Tables listed these allowed styles using design tokens alongside their resolved values, and included notes on usage to guide implementation across the product. Below is a snippet from the typography guidelines document that follows this format and reinforces the same organizational logic used in the Figma file. Anyone referencing the system, whether in design, engineering, or product, knew exactly where to find what they needed.

The Impact of Starting with Structure

The payoff wasn’t just cleanliness. It meant faster onboarding for designers, quicker iteration for product teams, smoother handoff to engineering, and reliable, centralized documentation that matched the component structure one-to-one.

Atomic Design isn’t a new concept, but applying it with discipline made all the difference on a system this large. It gave me the foundation to think modularly and design at scale.