North Dakota's Legacy Fund holds roughly $10 billion of the state's oil and gas revenue on behalf of its citizens. The assignment, as chief designer for GovCom Solutions: prototype a public disclosure portal that lets any North Dakotan see where that money is — every holding, every country, every sector — and make it real enough to demo against live endpoints, not as static mockups.
Designed in Figma, Built with Claude Code
The prototype's speed came from running two loops at once. Design moved in Figma: information architecture for four core pages, a chart language for holdings data, and a civic visual voice that reads as public infrastructure rather than a fintech pitch. Implementation moved in Claude Code against the design as it evolved: each Figma decision became working Next.js the same day, so every design review happened on a functioning site with real interactions and real data flowing.
That loop collapsed the usual gap between "approved design" and "first build." The demo the client walked into was the design.
A Real Architecture, Not a Facade
The prototype runs the stack the production system would: a WordPress VIP backend (PHP 8.2) exposing holdings data through WPGraphQL with a REST fallback, seeded from the fund's public CSV disclosures, and a Next.js 15 / React 19 frontend on the App Router with Server Components, Tailwind 4, Recharts for the analytics, and a world map of investment exposure. A Lando environment boots the whole system with one command, and a demo runbook lets anyone on the team run it.
Built for Every Citizen
The design carries the portfolio's usual convictions into civic work: a holdings explorer with filters by asset class, country, and sector; light and dark themes; and full localization — the same dashboards render in English, Spanish, and right-to-left Arabic. A transparency portal that only some residents can read isn't transparent.
The result: a state-fund disclosure experience designed, built, and demoed at prototype speed — with the architecture already shaped for the platform it would ship on.
