GM
2023
Multibrand Design Tokens
Context
A shared foundation across brands
Aurora explored how design tokens could support seven GM brands across design and engineering. I contributed to the strategy and early framework, including experiments with color scales, token naming, and role mappings.
The strategy proposed centralizing brand styles and translating tokenized decisions into platform-specific formats. These two slides show that original direction.
GM Core
Starting with GM Core
My involvement ended before the token proposal was completed. The following independent exploration builds on those early experiments to show how I would develop the framework further; it was not approved or implemented by GM.
I used the GM Core colors as a starting point. In this exploration, I kept the original base colors and adjusted a few shades to create smoother transitions within each color range.
Naming
Names that describe purpose
Token names describe where a color is used and what it does. For interactive elements, the name without a state suffix represents the resting state. Adding hover or pressed identifies how it changes during interaction.
Multibrand
One vocabulary, different brand values
The token name stays the same, but its value changes with the brand. Here, color.background.action uses GM Core blue in one example and an illustrative Chevrolet gold in the other. The text and background colors are chosen together so they work as a pair.
A shared framework across brands and platforms
Each brand would map its colors to the same set of shared token names. The selected brand and light or dark appearance would determine which values are used. Those tokens could then be translated into formats for web, iOS, and Android, giving teams a consistent structure while allowing each brand to retain its identity.
Additional project details and artifacts are not shown publicly to protect confidential work.
Explore more projects
