About
Updated October 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. In 2020 I co-founded the design system there and have worked on every layer of it ever since: 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, and checking every color pair against WCAG AA so accessibility sits in the foundations. 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 co-host the Into Design Systems meetup in Düsseldorf. Outside the day job I teach interface design, usability 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
- Shape the system’s direction, priorities and contribution model with design, engineering and product leadership, and own what it ships: components, tokens, patterns and usage guidelines. Styling moved from Tailwind to CSS Modules so any CSS-fluent developer can contribute. 33 components, 300+ Storybook stories, 1,100+ Figma variants, public docs at pandaUI.de.
- Built a WCAG AA contrast checker over every color token pair and the lint rules that enforce accessibility conventions. Contribute production code alongside the engineers: 1,100+ commits to the web app, fourth of about 130 contributors.
- Defined the primitive → semantic → component token architecture and naming convention, then set up the pipeline on Tokens Studio and Style Dictionary with the team.
- Ran the change management for a company-wide rebrand through the token layer: the new brand and dark mode shipped through tokens alone. Kept the legacy palette alongside the new one for a controlled migration, and facilitated a three-session rollout with the web, mobile and desktop teams.
- Govern through tooling, not decree: hardcoded colors fail the ESLint and Stylelint rules I wrote, so system code carries only semantic tokens. Built and rolled out a Figma plugin that syncs tokens to GitHub in four clicks, down from twelve manual steps across three tools; it keeps sipgate on Figma’s Organization plan and avoids an Enterprise upgrade, about $35k a year. Led sipgate onto Figma in 2020 and own the vendor relationship as org admin, negotiating and signing every contract since 2022.
- Lead the system’s AI-readiness: defined an agent-evaluation harness that scores real product prompts against our standards, scoped a Storybook MCP server for coding agents, and built three VS Code extensions with coding agents. Tested Figma MCP integrations, and a first wave of design system work shipped AI-assisted in 2026.
- Led the responsive, keyboard-accessible navigation redesign end to end, defined the interaction model, drove the move to a virtualized data grid for long tables, and documented the Figma components for editing settings in place.
- Cut design debt with evidence: a 600-screen interface inventory, library adoption analytics, icons consolidated 456 to 159, and a Chromatic suite cut from 893 snapshots a build to 311 by consolidating 467 stories into 104, so coverage per story went up as the count came down. Material UI stays a deliberate exception for the licensed data grid; every other component in the system is ours.
- Mentor and coach: two designers onboarded over six months each, an apprentice coached over three years into a permanent role. Run design system critiques and serve on design hiring panels as a decision-maker. Took over for the design-system team’s product manager during their sabbatical.
- Champion inclusive design beyond the code: co-founded IDEA, sipgate’s Inclusion, Diversity, Equity and Accessibility newsletter, now past 20 issues, and initiated the company Pride group, which I have led at Cologne Pride for six consecutive years.
University Lecturer and Certified Tutor
DIPLOMA University of Applied Sciences · Freelance | Remote
- Teach interface design, usability and web development as live online seminars, run workshop-style from Figma design to a site built in Webflow: about 90 students across four semesters, with individual written feedback on every submission.
- Review, develop and co-author the course book for the usability module.
- Supervise bachelor theses as both advisor and examiner.
Design Mentor
ADPList · Volunteer | Remote
- Mentor design students and working product designers one-on-one across 20 sessions, on design systems first and portfolio and CV reviews alongside.
- Coach on real work: critique the deliverable in front of us, talk through the trade-offs behind it, and help mentees decide their next step.
Freelance Designer
Neithernor & Co. | Cologne, Germany
- Ran my own studio for branding, identity and web work: logos, typography, print and websites for local businesses and artists.
- Built the studio’s own identity as a system: a bespoke typeface I drew, a multi-format logo system, templated stationery and a documented naming convention. Systems thinking before I had the title for it.
Education
Köln International School of Design | Cologne, Germany
Master of European Studies in Design
Konstfack · University of Arts, Crafts and Design | Stockholm, Sweden
Master’s Exchange Year
ENSCI · Les Ateliers | Paris, France
Bachelor’s Exchange Year
Köln International School of Design | Cologne, Germany
Bachelor of Arts, European Studies in Design
North Butler High School | Iowa, USA
Exchange Year during High-School
Gesamtschule Veenhusen | Veenhusen, Germany
High-School Diploma / Abitur