Columbia's Foundations is at the core of their user experience team's toolbox for their brand and sub-brands. Foundations provides foundational design elements, components, and templates for a team of 5 designers and 4 development squads. This phase of the design system strategy aimed to unify a fragmented multi-brand ecosystem into a single source of truth.
A centralized framework for four brands
CX Foundations connects four brands into a centralized design framework for technology, brand, and design teams to use. Despite the challenges of a small UX team managing all brands, the foundations empower designers to maintain brand cohesion, communicate more effectively, and deliver higher-quality designs.
Fragmented assets, tight deadlines, no foundation
When I joined Columbia, the digital assets for all four brands were fragmented — spread across various tools and internal knowledge bases. The CX team, brand designers, and engineering were expected to meet tight deadlines without a solid foundation to start from. Inconsistencies became more obvious as the brand and CX teams aimed to modernize the UI but were unable to coordinate that effort alone.
A unified repository representing each brand's digital language
CX Foundations standardized a universal design framework that represents each brand's digital language. It's a unified repository supporting each brand, helping streamline all three teams in modernizing and maintaining their interactive language.
A foundation for future phases to build on
As an IC design lead, I defined and implemented the base framework for the multi-brand design system initiative — building a robust foundation for future phases to come. The framework migrated five designers and four product tracks into Figma with a shared component library across all four brands.