About
Updated June 2026
Hi, I’m Thilko, a staff product designer who builds design systems. The name gives it away: I grew up in rural East Frisia, in the flat north of Germany, before design pulled me through Cologne, Paris and Stockholm, where a systems-oriented design program quietly set the course for everything since. I ran my own studio, Neithernor & Co., for two years, then joined sipgate in Düsseldorf, where I’ve spent seven years building the design system from the ground up: the design, the tokens, the code, the docs, and the patient work of getting every team to actually adopt it. Today it’s the backbone for 10 product teams.
I like the behind-the-scenes parts: writing the docs, pairing with developers until a component ships, naming 500+ tokens so dark mode just works across web, desktop, Android and iOS. Lately I’ve been making the system machine-readable, so AI agents can build with it the way our designers do. I keep the documentation public and talk about this stuff at Into Design Systems. Outside the day job I teach UI design and web development at an online university and mentor students and designers on ADPList. Honestly, I get as much out of it as they do.
Skills
Experience
Staff Product Designer | Design Systems
sipgate · Full-time
Düsseldorf, Germany · Hybrid
- Built sipgate’s design system from scratch and own it end to end: a Figma library with a React codebase, used across 10 product teams. 33 components, 500+ Storybook stories, 1,100+ Figma variants, ~10k inserts a week, with public docs at pandaUI.de.
- Ship production code alongside engineers: 1,000+ commits (top-5 all-time), pairing so the best handoff is no handoff. Built the system’s tooling: a Figma plugin that syncs tokens to GitHub in four clicks (from a brittle 12-step ritual), ESLint/StyleLint plugins, and a WCAG contrast checker for every token pair.
- Architected 500+ tokens (primitive → semantic → component) in Tokens Studio and Style Dictionary, driving theming, dark mode and localization across web, desktop, Android and iOS, then rolled a full rebrand on top, system intact.
- Lead the system’s AI-readiness so agents build with it like designers do: an agent-evaluation harness scored against our standards, exploratory Figma MCP server spikes, a custom MCP server, and machine-readable docs. Built Cursor/VS Code extensions and shipped tickets agentically.
- Shipped its most technical components: a Table/ListView on MUI (Material UI) X DataGrid (sorting, resizable/pinned columns, nested rows, row actions) with a custom virtualization wrapper, inline-edit form-builder patterns, and a responsive, keyboard-accessible navigation redesign.
- Cut design debt with evidence: a 600-screen interface inventory, library-adoption analytics, icons consolidated 456 → 159, and a Chromatic suite trimmed 893 → 321 with better coverage. Moved styling from Tailwind to CSS Modules so any CSS-fluent dev can contribute.
- Onboarded two designers over six months each and mentored a three-year apprentice into a full-time role, ran hiring panels and design-system critiques, led the 2020 company-wide Figma migration, and speak at Into Design Systems. Co-founded the IDEA inclusion newsletter and started the company Pride group, six years running.
University Lecturer and Certified Tutor
DIPLOMA University of Applied Sciences · Freelance
Remote
- Teach a user interface and a web development course as live online seminars.
- Supervise bachelor theses as advisor and examiner, and give each student detailed, individual written feedback.
- Run the seminars workshop-style with breakout rooms: students design a site in Figma and build it in Webflow, graded as a project with a live presentation.
- Wrote the official study booklet for the usability module as its credited author, and review other booklets and the module handbook.
- Keep the seminars grounded in real product work, bringing current industry practice to the next group of designers.
Design Mentor
ADPList · Volunteer
Remote
- Mentor design students and working product designers one-on-one on ADPList: portfolio and résumé reviews, design-system questions, and career decisions.
- Focus on the practical craft, critiquing real work, talking through trade-offs, and helping people present themselves well.
- Coach mentees to sharpen their thinking, tighten their deliverables, and find their footing in the job market.
Freelance Designer
Neithernor & Co.
Cologne, Germany
- Ran my own studio, Neithernor & Co., doing branding, web and identity for local businesses and artists before moving into product design.
- Delivered full identities across trades, healthcare, engineering and hospitality: logos, typography, print, and websites.
- Built and ran the studio itself end to end, from its logo and stationery to invoicing, contracts and naming conventions, an early version of the systems thinking I do now.
Education
North Butler High School
Exchange Year during High-School
Iowa, USA
Gesamtschule Veenhusen
High-School Diploma / Abitur
Veenhusen, Germany