Volta Grid
A design language for a national grid operator
Seven internal products, seven visual languages, one control room. We unified them without stopping a single release.
Client
Volta Grid
Sector
Energy
Year
2023
Duration
24 weeks
7 → 1
products on one system
Scope of work
Design system, Component library, Governance, Training
The write-up
Written by the people who did the work, not a marketing team.
Volta Grid operates national transmission infrastructure through seven internal applications, each built by a different team in a different decade. Operators moved between them all day and made mistakes at the seams.
No release freeze
The non-negotiable was that no team would pause shipping. So we built the system as a parallel track: tokens first, then primitives, then the components with the highest cross-product usage.
Each team adopted at its own pace against a shared migration checklist. Two products completed inside a quarter. The slowest took a year, and that was fine.
Governance that survives
A design system with no owner is a folder. We set up a rotating stewardship model — one engineer and one designer per quarter — plus a public request process with a published response time.
Result
Seven visual languages became one. Control-room error rates at the application seams dropped measurably in the first year, and the system has outlived two reorganisations.