Steam’s Gears Design System is a cohesive collection of UI building blocks, interaction patterns, and visual standards created to support scalable design across the Steam platform from storefront pages to game overlays and community features.

As Steam grew, so did its interface patterns. New features were shipped quickly, often built by different teams with different design philosophies. The result was Multiple button styles and interaction patterns, Inconsistent spacing, typography, and states, redundant component creation across teams, unclear design rules and missing documentation and slower development cycles.

What Steam needed wasn’t just more components, it needed a shared foundation. A unified system that could bring visual consistency to every surface, create predictable behavior across interactions, streamline collaboration between teams, and scale effortlessly as new features were introduced. Most importantly, this foundation had to support accessibility and long-term maintainability, ensuring Steam could continue to grow without compromising coherence or quality.

That system became Gears.

The goal wasn’t simply to tidy up visuals but was to create a living framework that could evolve alongside Steam’s expanding ecosystem. We envisioned Gears as a modular library of reusable UI components supported by a clear set of principles that define behavior and interaction. At the foundation sat a shared system of design tokens for color, spacing, and typography, ensuring consistency no matter who designed or built the interface.

To bring this vision to life, we built a documentation hub that translated design intentions into engineering-ready guidance, making implementation faster and more reliable. This gave teams the clarity they needed to innovate without constantly reinventing basic elements. Above all, Gears needed to feel authentically Steam, bold, functional, and rooted in the platform’s gamer-centric identity.

We began with an exhaustive design audit across two Steam pages - Store Page and the Library Page:

1. Buttons & Forms
   Found six different primary button styles, inconsistent padding, and missing states.

2. Navigation & Layouts
   Repeated patterns that didn’t scale well across web, overlay, and Big Picture modes.

3. Typography
   Font sizes and weights were used arbitrarily without a typographic hierarchy.

4. Accessibility Gaps
   Contrast failures, unclear focus states, unstructured content groups.

The audit revealed a truth common to many legacy products: The lack of a system wasn’t just a design issue, it was slowing down the entire pipeline.

The launch of Gears created measurable improvements across the entire Steam ecosystem. 

For designers, the system drastically reduced interface inconsistencies, enabled faster prototyping through ready-made components, and eliminated unnecessary decision fatigue by providing clear, reliable patterns. 

Developers benefited from a reusable front-end architecture that minimized design engineering discrepancies and ensured cleaner implementation through shared tokens. 

Ultimately, users felt the impact most when interactions became more seamless and predictable, Steam’s brand identity grew stronger through visual consistency, and the platform became more accessible and responsive overall.

One of my biggest takeaways from building Gears is that a design system is ultimately a cultural shift, not just a collection of components. It requires shared language, shared rules, and shared ownership far beyond what a UI library alone can solve.

Working outside a formal company structure also made me realize how much harder it is to build a system without existing processes or alignment. Every decision had to be intentional and self-sustaining.

Auditing Steam’s interfaces showed how quickly small inconsistencies compound into real UX problems, reinforcing the importance of thinking at scale. This project strengthened my ability to design for longevity and treat systems as evolving products rather than static deliverables.

For this project, we focused only on core Steam surfaces like the Store and Library, but there are many other areas to explore next.

Moving forward, I’d like to expand the audit to additional screens, refine more complex patterns, and deepen engineering alignment through coded components and motion guidelines. Accessibility and theming will also play a bigger role in future phases.

Above all, I’ve learned that a design system is never “done.” Its value comes from continuous care and contribution. As teams adopt and improve Gears, the system will grow, mature, and stay relevant long-term.