FORD GLOBAL DESIGN SYSTEM
A composition of elements, components, and templates that drive the Ford digital space.
Combining modern design with technology, the Ford Design System is a unified language and the sole guide for designing and developing within the Ford Digital Ecosystem.
Itโs meant to improve UI Consistency and quality and make the design and development process more efficient.
Overview
As the Lead UI/UX Designer for the North American Owner.Ford.com (Web) workstream, I owned design execution for an AEM 6.4 migration while helping mature a global design system intended to scale across in-vehicle, web, and mobile experiences.
Role & Team
Role: Lead UI/UX Designer โ NA Owner.Ford.com (Web) workstream lead
Team: Variable, with a core of 5 designers representing different workstreams (including Mach-E HMI). I represented the web portion of the team.
Collaboration: Cross-functional alignment with stakeholders and implementation partners to ensure authorable components and UI patterns shipped consistently through the platform upgrade.
Problem
The migration required auditing and adapting existing authorable AEM components to ensure they could be migrated and remain scalable, maintainable, and consistent with a newly forming global design systemโwhile ensuring components met accessibility expectations and real-world usage constraints. (AEM component structure + design configuration considerations are core to scalable AEM implementations.)
Skills Highlighted
UX Strategy, Component Thinking, Accessibility-First UI Validation, Design System Deployment, Cross-Team Alignment, W3C-WCAG Compliance.
What I Did
Component Audit + Migration Readiness (AEM 6.4)
Audited existing authorable components slated for migration
Identified gaps, redundancies, and places where patterns needed modernization for scalable reuse (aligned to AEM component and design configuration best practices).
Design System Contribution + Early Deployment Ownership
Helped inform and evolve new UI components and patterns as they moved from library โ real production usage.
Ensured patterns were usable across stakeholder needs and adaptable for broader system scale.
Accessibility Validation on Core Components
Led early accessibility checks across foundational UI elements: Buttons, dropdowns, input fields, and content cards.
Used findings to refine component behavior and standards so early releases shipped clean and consistently.
Icon Library Contributions (Rolling Discovery)
Contributed to the icon library based on ongoing discovery of needs emerging across workstreams.
Tools / Skills Highlighted
Figma (Collaborative Prototyping + Systems) โข Adobe Creative Suite (Graphic Development) โข Adobe Experience Manager (Constraint Adaptability & Functionality) โข Jira (Documentation)
ECOSYSTEM
ENVIRONMENT
This system is about eliciting a the feeling of obtainable premium and removing the noise and confusion. A a place where every piece of content lives in organized chaos.
SURFACE
The surface lays beneath and holds together this environment. Freeing elements to almost float enabling a physical real world interaction feedback loop.
LAYERS
Using three levels of layers to prioritize and organize content. Our environment will energize with motions.
PHILOSOPHY
ELEMENTS
An element is the basic unit of the whole ecosystem.
A group of elements conform a component.
COMPONENTS
A composition of elements to build out globally scalable components
// TYPE TREATMENT
// CALLS TO ACTION
// SELECTORS
// DROPDOWNS
// INPUT FIELDS
// RADIO CARDS
// CONTENT CARDS
// BILLBOARDS
// CAROUSELS
TEMPLATES
Templates are created by a group of components to create pages. They serve as an evergreen space where beauty is expressed in an organized way, and user interaction can exist.
