I build the systems behind the products I want to use.

I’m Vas — a design engineer working in the seam between product design and frontend engineering. I spend most of my time on the parts of software that don’t get screenshot for case studies: design systems, component libraries, design tooling, and the unglamorous flows that quietly carry a product.

Most of the last decade has been inside product teams at Sage, Selfridges, End Clothing, and Rosetta AI. The pattern that kept repeating: two design systems — one in Figma, one in code — quietly disagreeing with each other, and nobody with the time or the language to reconcile them. Most of my best work has been about closing that gap.

A working method

The strategy I keep landing on is small and stubborn: one set of tokens, one set of components, applied consistently across every surface a team ships on. Not a style guide. Not a Figma file with a sticker sheet. An actual system — tokens, primitives, themes, and modes — that both designers and engineers reach for as the default.

Ragnar is where I’m putting that idea into a product. It’s an open design system built on React, Radix, and Tailwind v4, with a three-layer token architecture (theme × mode × spacing × curves) that lets the same components carry an industrial-retro feel on one product and stay minimal on the next, without forking the codebase. It powers everything I build — and you’re welcome to build on top of it too.

Tools that fix the workflow

Alongside Ragnar I ship small Figma plugins. FigQA catches the boring inconsistencies in a component library before publish; Varvex visualises and exports Figma variables to CSS so design tokens stop drifting from the code that consumes them. Both started as scripts I wrote to fix a problem I had on a Tuesday afternoon. The good ones I keep.

More on the way

The plugins are the small end of a longer line of products I’m building on top of Ragnar — standalone tools for designers, product teams, and indie makers. A few are close to public; others are still scaffolding. I’ll announce them here as they land, and the essays are usually where the thinking shows up first.

Working together

I take on a small number of design engineering and product strategy engagements each year through Nordlean. The work that fits best: setting up or rescuing a design system, building internal design tooling, or shaping the first six months of a new product where design and engineering need to move as one. Small, senior, opinionated.

The best way to reach me is on Telegram — @vasfrolik.