Product Design Company in Chicago

Design engagements in Chicago are sized by surface area: a scoped Chicago product design engagement over eight to fourteen weeks for a focused product surface (new feature flow, onboarding redesign, dashboard redesign), covering research, design, prototyping, and engineering handoff, a full design system build (tokens, components, governance, documentation, Storybook setup) over twelve to twenty weeks, or a combined brand identity and design system engagement. Chicago rates sit below SF and NYC but above Atlanta and Austin because of the IIT Institute of Design, Northwestern Medill, and Leo Burnett alumni talent premium. We give fixed-fee proposals rather than open hourly engagements.

The Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA), enacted 2008, is the most aggressive US biometric privacy regime and the only one with private right of action and statutory damages (USD $1,000 per negligent violation, USD $5,000 per intentional violation, per scan in most readings of the statute and recent case law including Cothron v. White Castle). It applies to any collection of fingerprint, face geometry, iris, retina, voice print, or hand or palm geometry from an Illinois resident. For product design that means face unlock, voice authentication, fingerprint sign-in, photo tagging with face detection, and even some camera-based attention or emotion features require written informed consent before collection, a written policy on retention and destruction, and a prohibition on sale or disclosure. We integrate BIPA review at design concept stage, draft compliant consent flows, and document retention design before engineering builds the feature.

Yes. Chicago enterprises (United Airlines, Walgreens, Allstate, Discover, Abbott) run product portfolios with 20 to 200 internal applications and need design system governance that scales beyond a single Figma library. We build the token architecture in Tokens Studio with semantic and component tokens layered on primitive tokens, document components in Storybook with Chromatic visual regression in CI, distribute tokens to web, iOS, and Android through Specify or Supernova, and establish a design system contribution and review model with explicit roles for product designers, design system designers, and engineering platform teams. We have patterned deployments after public design system work from United Airlines, Sprout Social, and Salesforce Lightning, including dark-mode token strategy and theming for white-label products.

Yes, with appropriate humility about scope. Leo Burnett works at HoldCo scale with category-defining campaigns over multi-year client relationships. We do not pitch against Leo Burnett, Energy BBDO, FCB Chicago, or DDB on top-of-funnel TV-centric brand work. We do build product-led brand identity systems for Series A to C SaaS, fintech, and consumer brands where the brand expression lives primarily in the product, the website, the documentation, the support experience, and lifecycle email rather than thirty-second TV. Our brand work includes logo system, type system, colour system with accessibility compliance documented, illustration and iconography system, photography direction, motion principles, and a brand guidelines document maintained in Notion or Figma rather than a static PDF that rots in week three.

HIPAA-compliant design starts with information architecture decisions that minimise PHI exposure in the interface, never relying on UI-only controls (browser title, ARIA labels, exported PDFs all leak PHI if architecture is wrong). We design role-based access controls into the IA, build audit-log surfaces that meet HHS Office for Civil Rights expectations, design break-glass workflows for emergency access, and integrate with HIPAA-aligned authentication (no general-purpose Google or Microsoft personal accounts on PHI). For Northwestern Medicine, Rush, University of Chicago Medicine, and Walgreens-scale clients we additionally design for FDA Software as a Medical Device (SaMD) Class II review where applicable, and for biometric authentication features we layer BIPA written consent on top of HIPAA Notice of Privacy Practices.

We hire against the standards those programs set and several team members hold degrees from IIT Institute of Design (the ID), Northwestern Medill IMC, or comparable programs. The ID, founded as the New Bauhaus by Laszlo Moholy-Nagy in 1937, is consistently the top US graduate design school and its alumni define applied design research methodology globally. Medill IMC anchors integrated marketing communications design. We attend ID's annual Design Strategy Conference, recruit from senior thesis showcases, and contribute back through guest critiques and recruitment partnerships. For a project that requires genuine design research depth (ethnographic field work, design strategy at McKinsey or IDEO scale) we scope appropriately and partner with ID alumni networks rather than overstating in-house capability.

Financial services accessibility in Chicago has multiple overlapping regimes. Section 508 applies to federal contracts (Discover, Allstate, and others touch federal procurement). WCAG 2.1 AA is the de facto standard for FFIEC examinations. The ADA Title III private right of action is active in the Northern District of Illinois and the Seventh Circuit. Illinois Civil Rights Act of 2003 adds state-level accessibility obligations. We design every customer-facing surface to WCAG 2.1 AA from the start (not as a remediation), validate continuously through axe DevTools and Stark in Figma, run manual screen reader testing with NVDA and VoiceOver, and produce an accessibility conformance report (ACR) using the VPAT 2.4 template for clients with federal contract exposure. For high-litigation clients we add an annual third-party audit through Deque or Level Access.

A focused product surface (single flow redesign, single feature design, single onboarding rework) runs eight to fourteen weeks from kickoff to engineering handoff. A multi-surface product redesign (full app, multiple personas, multiple flows) runs sixteen to twenty-eight weeks. A design system build with documentation and governance runs twelve to twenty weeks for the first version, with ongoing maintenance and component expansion typically retained for six to twelve months after launch. Brand identity work runs eight to sixteen weeks. Combined product design plus design system plus brand work for a Series B SaaS company typically runs six to nine months total elapsed time with overlapping workstreams. We do not run open-ended design retainers without scoped deliverables and decision points.