01 / 2025
Design system · Fintech
Aurora
A token-driven design system unifying nine products under one visual language.
- Role
- Lead product designer
- Timeline
- 10 months, 2024 to 2025
- Platform
- Web, iOS, Android
- Team
- 3 designers, 14 engineers
The brief
Nine products, nine button styles, one brand. Aurora replaced a decade of drift with a single token-driven language.
The challenge
The audit told the story: 47 button variants, 19 shades of grey, four spacing scales, and zero documentation anyone trusted. Each product team had forked the UI library years ago and never looked back.
The brief was not "make it pretty." It was to design a system strong enough that convergence became the path of least resistance, without freezing nine roadmaps while we built it.
The approach
- 01
Token architecture
Three tiers: primitives, semantic roles, component slots. Every color, size, and duration resolves through a role, so themes and rebrands become data changes, not redesigns.
- 02
Component contracts
Each component shipped with a written contract: anatomy, states, accessibility behavior, and the exact tokens it consumes. Engineers reviewed contracts before any pixels moved.
- 03
Adoption tooling
A migration linter flagged legacy patterns in CI and suggested the system replacement. Teams adopted Aurora screen by screen, with a scoreboard tracking coverage in the open.
The outcome
- 9/9
- products migrated
- 47→1
- button variants
- 2 wks
- to first team adoption
Aurora shipped to all nine products inside a year. New surfaces now start from the system by default, and the design team reviews exceptions instead of policing basics.
The linter did more diplomacy than any meeting. Teams migrated because the system was genuinely the easier path.
