Staff Design Systems Designer & Architect — Bayer, Fortune 500

I turn chaos into systems.

The shared language 300+ dev teams and 160+ brands speak every day — designed, engineered, and argued for by one person. Scroll, and watch the noise organize.

Six years of my life live in these systems. Worth every token.

See the work→

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Selected work

01 — Index · 2018–2026

P.01 uxElle Next-gen design system
2026 · In progress A ground-up rebuild of Bayer's enterprise system for the AI era — W3C DTCG tokens, React, Figma MCP, and a fully automated Variables → JSON → CSS pipeline. Greenlit by a business case I wrote myself. The one I fought for.

uxElle enterprise design system — React and TypeScript component library built on W3C DTCG design tokens and Figma MCP

P.02 Element Enterprise design system
2019–present · 300+ teams The system running the company while its successor is built. Multi-brand token pipeline generating production CSS for 160+ brands simultaneously. 90% adoption — earned, not mandated. The one that never sleeps.

P.03 Alias Flow ↗ Figma plugin
2025 · Figma Community Click any Figma variable and follow its alias chain across collections and modes — the token graph, made visible. Built to fill a real gap in Figma's native tooling. Built on nights I couldn't let it go.

Variable Alias Flow — Figma plugin visualizing design token alias chains across Figma Variables collections and modes

P.04 Contrast Checker ↗ Figma plugin
2025 · Figma Community WCAG 2.1 AA validation at 160-brand scale — every foreground/background combination tested, failures surfaced by component.

P.05 Crop Science B2B e-commerce UX
$2M+ incremental revenue End-to-end UX for Bayer's agricultural e-commerce platform — pre- and post-auth flows, complex catalog navigation, purchasing workflows built for farmers, not funnels.

Bayer Crop Science B2B e-commerce platform — end-to-end enterprise UX design contributing to $2M+ incremental revenue

P.06 DART Financial analysis tool
Designed & developed Financial storytelling in React and Chart.js — waterfall charts, year-over-year comparisons, and program dashboards, all built on the design system.

DART financial analysis tool — React and Chart.js data visualization dashboards built on an enterprise design system

P.07 DoughNaughty Mobile UX/UI
Freelance commission A donut delivery app — location-aware ordering, cart, checkout. Proof that rigor and delight belong together. Pure joy. Zero governance meetings.

DoughNaughty mobile app — end-to-end UX and UI design for a location-aware food delivery product

Why I do this

Good systems are acts of care that nobody will ever thank you for. I don't write design tokens because I love naming things "surface-secondary-hover." I write them so some engineer at 2am doesn't have to guess what blue I meant. That's it. That's the romance.

written at 2am, obviously

Live token graph

02 — W3C DTCG · Interactive

Select any token to trace its alias chain — primitive → semantic → component.

L1 / Primitives — raw values

L2 / Semantics — decisions

L3 / Components — applied

The same architecture runs 160+ brands in production. This is one palette of it.

Both roles. One owner.

03 — Practice

Stephen Salyer — Staff Design Systems Architect and Design Technologist (design tokens, React, Figma MCP, AI-assisted development), St. Louis

Design and engineering. Not hand-off — ownership.

At Bayer I'm the primary technical design systems architect for a Fortune 500 organization: 300+ dev teams, 160+ brands, 100+ products globally. I own the complete stack — uxElle, the AI-era rebuild, and Element, the legacy system still running the company.

I got uxElle greenlit by writing the business case for why a 2019-deprecated foundation couldn't serve an AI-native organization. Deep execution plus the organizational argument for systemic change — that's what Staff means to me. And honestly? It's the best part of the job.

iToken ArchitectureW3C DTCG · Figma Variables · Style Dictionary v5 · multi-brand, multi-mode at 160+ scale

iiDesign System DesignComponent architecture · Figma multi-file systems · Code Connect · contribution models

iiiFront-End EngineeringReact · TypeScript · Storybook · Node.js · GitHub Actions · CI/CD

ivAI & Agentic DevelopmentCursor rules · Figma MCP · Claude Code · the system as semantic guardrail for AI

vAccessibilityWCAG 2.1 AA · original a11y Code Connect pattern · contrast automation at scale

viGovernance & Org DesignBusiness case development · contribution models · 90% adoption across 300+ teams

Six years at scale

04 — Timeline · 2018–present

Bayer2019 — Present · Full-time

Staff Design Systems Designer & Architect

Primary technical design systems architect across a Fortune 500. Simultaneously leading uxElle (ground-up rebuild) while maintaining Element (300+ teams). Wrote the business case that greenlit uxElle. Invented the a11y Code Connect pattern. Authored company-wide Cursor AI context files. Led e-commerce UX contributing to $2M+ in revenue.

React · TypeScript · W3C DTCG · Figma REST API · Style Dictionary v5 · Code Connect · Cursor AI · Claude Code · Figma MCP · Storybook · WCAG 2.1 AA

Estée Lauder2025 · 6 months · Freelance

Design Systems Consultant

Maintained and evolved the enterprise Figma design system. Rebuilt component APIs to eliminate prop/HTML naming conflicts. Introduced composable wrapper patterns for menus and tooltips, mirroring developer patterns.

Figma · Component API · Wrapper patterns

Scorch Agency2018 — 2019 · Full-time

Front-End Designer

Responsive front-end interfaces for TIAA Bank, Microsoft, and LinkedIn across 15+ simultaneous projects. Component library and design system principles throughout.

Front-end · Component libraries · Enterprise

05 — Correspondence · Remote from St. Louis · Staff / Principal

Let's buildthe system.

Bring me the chaos — the 40 shades of blue, the six button components, the teams that stopped talking. That's my favorite starting point.

Stephenpsalyer@gmail.com

"A design system is not a component library. It is the language the organization speaks — and the semantic layer AI codes from."