Design foundations
Color, typography, spacing, iconography, and motion principles rooted in accessibility and consistency. Accessible to designers through Figma libraries.
Design systems
Pulse Design System
A unified design language for Teladoc Health's digital products
- Timeline
- 2020–2021
- Role
- Design Systems, UX, UI, WCAG
- Team
- 3 Designers, Cross-functional teams
Summary
I led the creation of Pulse, a multi-brand design system adopted across Teladoc, Livongo, and myStrength. It unified teams, tools, and interfaces across a product ecosystem that had grown fragmented through acquisition. The result was a scalable, themeable system that empowered distributed teams, reduced design and engineering drift, and accelerated time to market across Teladoc's web and mobile product suite.
The Problem
A fractured product ecosystem
After acquiring Livongo and myStrength, Teladoc Health was left with a fractured product ecosystem. Each brand carried its own visual language, component libraries, and interaction patterns, and design teams worked across incompatible tools (Sketch, Adobe, Figma) with no single source of truth. The codebases were just as fragmented, so even a trivial change like updating a color value turned expensive and slow across every system. Designers and engineers couldn't move quickly, and members who touched more than one Teladoc service ran into inconsistent experiences.
The Solution
One system, every brand
As the lead designer on a dedicated systems team, I guided the creation of Pulse, a unified design system built to scale across Teladoc, Livongo, and myStrength. Designed for flexibility, accessibility, and cross-brand consistency, Pulse became the single source of truth for Teladoc's consumer applications.
Multi-brand flexibility
A themeable system with design tokens and code-based theming, so each brand could express itself without duplicating effort. Accessible to developers through NPM packages.
Production-ready components
Reusable, documented components built for React and Vue, tied directly to Figma libraries, so everyone could cook from the same ingredients.
Governance model
A lightweight intake and review process that kept the system consistent while still inviting contributions from distributed teams.
The system
Tokens, components, documentation
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Collaboration Highlights
Built with the teams it served
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Partnered with front-end engineers to implement a token-based workflow, aligning Figma libraries with the React and Vue JS codebases.
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Facilitated design system training and onboarding for product and engineering teams across multiple Teladoc business units.
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Led weekly governance sessions to review contributions, manage updates, and maintain system integrity.
The Impact
Less drift, faster delivery
Pulse reduced design and engineering drift, sped up time to market, and improved consistency across Teladoc's suite of web and mobile products. It freed teams to spend more time solving user problems and less time reinventing UI patterns.
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Supported cross-functional teams of designers, front-end developers, and mobile engineers across multiple product lines and brands.
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Decreased new feature build time by reducing design-to-dev handoff friction.
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Empowered distributed teams to ship with consistency and confidence.
Derek is collaborative, communicative, and deeply skilled. His background in front-end development made our work on the Teladoc design system seamless, bridging design and engineering effortlessly. He brought clarity, calm, and cross-functional leadership that made a complex project a real success.
All projects
- Pulse Design System Staff Product Designer · 2020–2021Design systems
- Livongo Web App Senior Product Designer · 2019–2020Chronic condition management
- myStrength Mobile App Creative Director · 2015–2019Digital behavioral health