// role: team-lead · design-system · tomtom
Design Systems Lead — Amsterdam, NL
I build the components, rules, and shared language
that let design teams move fast without breaking consistency.
Jennifer's path into design systems didn't start on a screen — it started on a press sheet. Trained in media design in Cologne, her early years were spent in the exacting world of pharmaceutical print: prepress files, brand guidelines, and client sign-offs where a millimeter off-register mattered.
That discipline carried straight into digital. Since 2010 she's worked almost entirely inside one company — TomTom — growing from an intern on the UX visual design team into the person who now defines how an entire automotive product line looks, behaves, and scales across screens, vehicles, and markets.
Today, as Team Lead of TomTom's Design System, her job sits at the intersection of craft and infrastructure: building the components, tokens, and documentation that let dozens of designers and engineers ship consistent experience — without everyone re-solving the same problem twice.
Design tokens are the smallest decisions in a system — a color, a spacing unit, a type size — that everything larger is built from. The same idea, applied to a career:
TomTom · Amsterdam · Part-time, Hybrid
Leads the team responsible for the design system powering TomTom's Automotive products — the shared components, patterns, and guidelines that let the company offer white-label customisation across vehicle brands without rebuilding the experience from scratch each time.
TomTom · Amsterdam · Full-time
Senior design leadership across product lines, setting visual and interaction standards at a level above individual projects — the role that bridges day-to-day craft and the systems-level thinking her current role now formalises.
TomTom · The Randstad, Netherlands
Stepped up into seniority, taking greater ownership of visual direction across TomTom's screen-based products.
TomTom
Six years of icon, screen, and interface design across TomTom's navigation hardware and software — the long middle stretch where craft becomes instinct.
TomTom
Joined the UX Visual Design team — icon design, screen design, interface design — the entry point into what would become a 15-year career at one company.
Angela Liedler GmbH · Pharma communications agency
Print and digital design for pharmaceutical brand campaigns — postcards, brochures, banners, presentations — plus prepress production and project management with print vendors. The training ground for working precisely, inside someone else's brand rules.
webnews GmbH
Community support alongside production of "Dom-Check," a weekly opinion survey on current news — an early lesson in building something people would show up for repeatedly.
Rheinische Fachhochschule Köln · 2006 – 2009
A broad, hands-on media-design curriculum — graphic design, typography, prepress and press, information design, audiovisual and motion design, storyboard and production, website design with HTML/CSS and Flash, interface design, illustration, sound design, and 3D visualization — the generalist foundation that made specializing in systems later feel natural.
Open to conversations about design systems, design leadership, and the long, unglamorous work of making consistency feel effortless.
Connect on LinkedIn ↗