A design system taken past its edge

The system stopped where the campaigns started

I joined the digital sales team to support the commercial side. Landing pages, mailings, paid media for Google and Meta, and the placements the bank's app serves through its own API. Different formats, different specs, different deadlines, all of them pointed at the same products.

The bank was not starting from nothing. There was a design system, and it was solid, but it had been built for the app and the website. Campaigns lived outside its edge, so every campaign got invented again, and each one drifted a little further from the bank's digital identity. Nobody decided that. It is just what happens when the system ends before the work does.

The gap is not visible in any single piece. It shows up when you put a year of them side by side.

Expanding it to where the work happens

An email client ignores half of modern CSS. An ad unit is locked to a fixed pixel size. A placement inside the app arrives through the app's own API and lands between a balance and a transfer. The original system had never had to answer for any of that, so we answered for it: same brand, same rules, extended into paid and into the bank's owned channels.

This was team work, and I would rather be accurate than impressive about it. I had a big part in it. It was not mine.

My side of it ran mostly in Figma and with AI agents. The agents earned their place on email, where the rules are strictest and the repetition is highest, and getting those formats to something reliable is most of what moved production from three days to one.

• 01The bank's system extended, never a second one competing with it. Campaigns stopped being the place where the identity drifted.
• 02Components resolved per channel: web, email, paid, in-app. Each built to the constraint it actually ships against.
• 03AI agents on the email formats, which are the most repetitive and the most fragile part of the whole operation.
• 04A written work plan and a process for building pages, so the next page does not begin as a conversation.

From telling to taking somewhere

The pages were heavily informative. That is the fair description of them: a bank has a great deal it needs to tell you, and the page told you all of it. Everything true, everything present, and none of it arranged around the person reading.

We have been turning them into journeys instead. The question stopped being what this page has to say and became where this person is going, what they need to understand to get there, and whether any of it can be worth their time. On a sales page there is a third thing to answer for, which is whether it converts.

Understand, enjoy, convert. In that order, because the third one does not happen without the first two.

A page is rarely one page

bhd.com.do had been accumulating for years: pages built at different times, each solving its own layout. Part of the answer was a new set of page templates, so the site could be refreshed broadly and stay consistent while the bank kept publishing.

The other part was treating a template as a floor rather than a ceiling. We build tailored experiences for specific products and we A/B test them, so the credit card landing is one page in the navigation and several in practice: the general version can be swapped for one built around a specific card.

That is the difference between finishing a page and finishing a system. One is done when you hand it over. The other is done when the people using it stop needing you.

What changed

The team went from producing assets on request to assembling them from something shared, and the advertising stopped looking like it came from somewhere else. The two pieces I am proudest of are both live: Cuenta Móvil and the credit card application. Both are built to sell, and both became my best performing pages and a real win for the team on conversion and on retention.

1 day

To produce a campaign piece. It used to take three

4

Channels on one system: web, email, paid, in-app

2

Sales landings that outperformed the rest: Cuenta Móvil and the credit card page