Portside

Brief

Portside is a self-initiated concept for a freight-scheduling tool aimed at small maritime freight operators — a category of software that's usually either a spreadsheet or an enterprise platform with no middle ground. The exercise: design a system, not a set of screenshots, so a small engineering team could actually build and extend it.

Approach

Work started with the states nobody puts in a portfolio: an empty schedule, a conflicting booking, a failed sync, a slow connection at sea. The component library was built to handle those first, then the three key flows (creating a booking, resolving a conflict, viewing the week) were assembled from the same components — so the system, not the screens, is the actual deliverable.

Outcome

A documented Figma library with defined states and spacing rules that a two-person engineering team could build from directly, plus the three key flows as reference screens — a concrete demonstration of what 'a design system, not just mockups' means in practice.