Figma Design System Theming
2024Design Lead
How we reduced 340 token overrides to 28 while supporting 4 product themes. A story about naming conventions, governance, and letting go of pixel perfection.
Lena Fischer
Lead Product Designer
I design systems and tools that disappear into the workflow. Ten years making complex things feel simple — healthcare, developer platforms, and everything in between.
- Berlin, Germany
- lenafischer.design
- Dribbble
- Read.cv
About
I started in hospital UX research, watching nurses work 12-hour shifts on software that fought them at every turn. That experience burned a conviction into my work: tools should feel like they're on your side. Since then I've designed design systems at Figma, healthcare workflows at Clue, and developer dashboards at Vercel. I care about information density, motion that means something, and accessibility as a baseline, not a checklist.
Experience
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2023 — Present
Lead Product Designer, Design Systems
Figma · Berlin (remote)
Design lead for Figma's internal design system team, shaping the components and patterns used by 200+ designers across the company.
- Redesigned the component library architecture to support theming, reducing token overrides from 340 to 28 across 12 product surfaces.
- Led the accessibility audit that brought Figma's editor UI from WCAG A partial to AA full compliance.
- Created the contribution model that grew external component submissions from 2/quarter to 15/quarter.
- Facilitated 40+ cross-team design critiques and established the design system governance process.
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2021 — 2023
Senior Product Designer, Dashboard
Vercel · Berlin (remote)
Owned the core developer dashboard experience: deployments, logs, analytics, and project settings.
- Redesigned the deployment detail page, improving the task-completion rate for debugging failed deploys by 34%.
- Built the real-time log viewer that became the #1 most-used Dashboard feature by session time.
- Created the Vercel design system's data visualization guidelines, adopted across all analytics surfaces.
- Reduced onboarding drop-off by 18% through a progressive disclosure redesign of the project creation flow.
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2018 — 2021
Product Designer
Clue (Period & Cycle Tracking) · Berlin, Germany
Design for a health app used by 12M people monthly. Focus on data visualization, tracking flows, and sensitive health content.
- Redesigned the cycle prediction visualization; user trust in predictions increased by 22% (measured via in-app survey).
- Designed the "Health Report" export feature used by 800K users to share cycle data with their doctors.
- Established Clue's inclusive design guidelines for gender-neutral language and body-diverse illustration.
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2015 — 2018
UX Researcher & Designer
Charité — Universitätsmedizin Berlin · Berlin, Germany
Embedded researcher in the nursing informatics department. Redesigned clinical documentation workflows.
- Led contextual inquiry studies across 6 hospital wards; findings reshaped the ICU documentation system used by 2,000 nurses.
- Reduced medication reconciliation errors by 41% through a redesigned intake checklist.
- Published two papers on clinical UX in the International Journal of Medical Informatics.
Selected Case Studies
Vercel Log Viewer
2022Designer
Designing a real-time log streaming interface for developers who are already frustrated. Research, prototyping, and the importance of monospace fonts.
Clue Health Report
2020Designer
An export feature that helps 800K users share intimate health data with doctors. Privacy-first design in a sensitive context.
ICU Documentation Redesign
2017Lead Researcher & Designer
Contextual inquiry in intensive care: how shadowing nurses for 200 hours changed a hospital's approach to clinical software.
Capabilities
- Figma
- Design Systems
- User Research
- Accessibility
- Design Tokens
- Usability Testing
- Sketch
- Framer
- Prototyping
- HTML/CSS
- Storybook
- React
- Contextual Inquiry
- A/B Testing
- Principle
- Information Architecture
Education
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MA, Design Research
Universität der Künste Berlin · Berlin, Germany
Thesis: "Designing for clinical time pressure: a framework for high-stakes healthcare interfaces."
2015 -
BA, Communication Design
Hochschule für Technik und Wirtschaft Berlin · Berlin, Germany
2013
Recognition
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2021
Red Dot Design Award — Interface Design
Red Dot
For the Clue cycle prediction visualization.
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2020
iF Design Award
iF International Forum Design
Clue Health Report feature.
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2017
Best Paper — Clinical UX Track
MedInfo Conference
ICU documentation workflow research.
Languages
German (Native)English (Fluent)French (Conversational)