When your design system meets a brand refresh: a reality check
In 2023, as Back Market approached its 10th anniversary, the company decided to mature beyond its rebellious teenage years and retire its signature sticker-like illustrations for a new brand identity. What began in June 2022 as 'just updating fonts and colors' evolved into a comprehensive year-long transformation of our design system and products.
As a design manager of the design system team, I was in charge of planning the different steps of the migration to the new brand identity and ensuring that every product designer in the company adds the knowledge and tools to go through those different as smoothly as possible without interrupting too much the delivery of new features for their product squad.
Our team seized this opportunity to introduce a new semantic token system for Colors and Typography. This system addressed unique challenges in our new brand identity - including the management of nine different primary colors - while supporting expansion into Asian markets with full Japanese and Korean language support.
2210
new tokens
68
components updated
76
design files migrated
Accessibility became a cornerstone of this refresh. We redesigned most of our component APIs to meet WCAG 2.2 requirements, ensuring Back Market's experience would be truly inclusive for all users. This meant rethinking contrast ratios, interaction states, and information hierarchies across our entire component library.
The final phase focused on our documentation infrastructure. Through targeted workshops with designers, engineers, and product managers, we uncovered pain points in our existing documentation. This led to a complete overhaul of our documentation site's information architecture and the creation of new writing guidelines to ensure consistency across all design system documentation.
To explore the technical architecture and engineering solutions behind our mobile apps migration, check out Jean-Charles Sorin's detailed breakdown in his article:
Discover the Magic Working Behind our New Mobile App Rebranding.
