Private aviation platform, 450K+ passengers across 48 US cities
SurfAir Mobility
Before situation
A merger was coming. The platform was about to go from a small subscription service to one covering charter flights, route management, and a much larger operation. Every UI decision up to that point had been made by engineers without a senior designer guiding the work — no design system, no consistent visual language, no way to scale the product to where it needed to go. Without a solid design foundation before the merger, nothing would hold together at scale.
My role
Across 13 months, the work covered three big pillars. A design system built from scratch, with components, patterns, tokens, and variants structured for a complex web app and ready to scale with the engineering team. A full platform redesign spanning subscription flights, charter bookings, flight management, and account settings, turning a multi-product platform into something that finally feels like one coherent product. And dev-ready delivery throughout, with Figma files structured for clean handoff and just the right number of variants to cover every use case without the chaos.
The Result
The work shipped into a company going through massive change. Surf Air completed its Southern Airways acquisition, went public on the NYSE, and grew into an operation serving 450,000+ passengers annually across 48 US cities.
Business impact
Good design doesn't always show up in dashboards. Sometimes it shows up in how fast engineering ships, how few questions get asked in Slack, and how rarely a PM has to clarify intent. That's the kind of impact that compounds quietly over 13 months.
