Design system & front-end · 2024
Client — Aspire Zone Foundation
Stack — Figma → HTML / Bootstrap / CSS → ASP.NET CMS
Languages — English (LTR) & Arabic (RTL)

Redesigning the digital home of Qatar's national sports city

A component-by-component redesign of aspirezone.qa — from cards and sliders to forms and modals — rebuilt as a reusable, bilingual library for a live ASP.NET CMS serving stadiums, Academies.

40+
Reusable UI components documented and built
2×
Full language builds — English and Arabic RTL
12
Card style variations for one content model
1
Shared Bootstrap + CSS base powering every page
01 — Overview

One organisation, five audiences, one CMS to hold it together

Aspire Zone runs stadiums, a sports academy, a hospital, a logistics arm and a hotel — under one foundation, one CMS, and (soon) one visual language.

Aspire Zone Foundation is the organisation behind Qatar's national sports city in Doha — Khalifa International Stadium, Aspire Academy, Aspetar sports hospital, Aspire Logistics and The Torch Doha hotel all sit under it. The public website is the front door to all of it: news, events, venue bookings, careers, tour requests, feedback forms, and corporate information, published through a custom ASP.NET CMS in English and Arabic.

The existing site had accumulated years of one-off page templates — a card here, a slider there — with no shared system behind them. My brief was to redesign the site in Figma and then rebuild it as production-ready, reusable HTML/CSS components the CMS team could assemble like building blocks, page after page, in both languages.

"Every editor should be able to build a new page from the same set of parts — without a developer redrawing a card from scratch." — Working brief, translated from the project kickoff
aspirezone.qa
Redesigned Aspire Zone homepage, desktop view
02 — Process

From facility map to file structure

The site's own venue map — numbered pins connected across the zone — became the mental model for how the component library itself should be organised.

01

Audit & discover

Catalogued every existing template on the live site — cards, sliders, forms, tables, popovers — and grouped near-duplicates that had drifted apart over time.

02

Design in Figma

Rebuilt the visual language around Aspire's magenta and slate palette, then designed each component with every real state it needed: empty, hover, filled, error, RTL-mirrored.

03

Build the system

Converted the Figma library into semantic HTML with Bootstrap grid and utility-first CSS — one class system, reused across cards, forms, sliders, modals and navigation.

04

Integrate into the CMS

Wired components into the ASP.NET templates so editors could compose pages — hero, events, venues, feedback — without touching a stylesheet.

03 — Component library

The same grid, dozens of situations

A selection of the component families delivered — each one built once and reused across news, events, venues, hospitality and corporate pages.

04 — Bilingual by default

Every component was designed to flip, not just translate

Aspire Zone publishes in English and Arabic from the same CMS. Rather than mirror pages after the fact, spacing, icon direction, button order and alignment were built as logical (start/end) values from the start — so a component authored once in Figma works both ways without a second design pass.

Try the toggle: the card on the right swaps direction, font and button order live.

COMPONENT — feedback card dir: ltr

Your feedback matters

Tell us about your experience across Aspire Zone's venues and services.

System coverage went from ~6 ad-hoc templates to 1 documented library.
Measured against the original template audit at project kickoff.
RESULT / 01

Editors compose, developers stop redrawing

CMS editors can now assemble a new landing page — hero, event cards, venue map, feedback CTA — entirely from existing components, with no new CSS per page.

RESULT / 02

One design language across five sub-brands

Aspire Academy, Aspetar, Aspire Logistics, The Torch Doha and the Foundation itself now read as one family, instead of five loosely related templates.

RESULT / 03

Arabic stopped being an afterthought

RTL states shipped with every component from day one, cutting the back-and-forth that previously happened only after English pages were already approved.

05 — Reflection

What this project actually tested

  • Systems thinking over screen design. The job wasn't "design a homepage" — it was deciding which twelve card layouts were actually one card with modifiers, and which were genuinely different components.
  • Designing for someone else's CMS. Every component had to survive being dropped into an existing ASP.NET template by a content editor, not just look right in Figma.
  • Bilingual as a constraint, not a checkbox. Building RTL in from the first component made the English version more disciplined too — anything that only worked one direction got redesigned.
  • Restraint in a large surface area. With this many component families, the risk was visual noise. Keeping one grid, one radius scale and one accent colour across all of them held the system together.