Ladoga UI

A lightweight headless foundation for quickly building your own design systems for new and internal products.

VK already had a mature design system, VKUI, built primarily around VKontakte's needs and specifics. But not every smaller product or internal tool needed the full complexity, scale, and visual ties of a large ecosystem-wide system. We wanted to build a lightweight foundation that could be quickly adopted and extended whenever a project needed its own unique design system.

I joined Ladoga at an early stage, when the engineering team didn't yet have a dedicated designer. I took full ownership of the design side of the project, running it alongside my main role. I designed the system's architecture and principles, developed the color palette and token system, built the Figma library, created the components and wrote their specs. In parallel, three engineers from the VKUI team implemented the system in code. A dedicated designer joined the project later.

Ladoga wasn't designed for any specific interface. It was meant to become a universal foundation for products that didn't exist yet at the time. That meant clearly separating components' functional behavior from their visual language, avoiding patterns tied to any single product.

Instead of user research, we analyzed existing approaches to designing design systems. We looked at:

• Base UI — as an example of headless primitives;
• shadcn/ui — as an approach to composable components;
• VKUI — as an example of a mature product system.

Our goal was to understand how lightweight, headless systems handle primitives, composition, and theming, and to rethink VKUI's component architecture.

Since Ladoga wasn't tied to a single product, its color system had to be flexible enough to support a wide range of visual languages. We developed several shades for each base color so the system could fit a wide variety of projects, while keeping VK's signature blue as the main accent for continuity with the ecosystem.

In three months we completed the first working version of Ladoga: a headless foundation with a flexible color system, design tokens, 17 base components, and full documentation. The system was tested on internal admin interfaces and handed off to the team for further development. The initiative was later put on hold after the engineering lead who had been driving the project left the company.

Working on Ladoga reinforced a principle that matters to me: a design system doesn't need to solve every single product problem to be useful. By keeping the foundation small, headless, and composable, we let very different products build their own visual language on one solid base.