Rebranding, or the subtle art of juggling new and legacy design systems
summary
Company executes a rebrand in 3 months while keeping two active design systems, using a small SWAT team then scaling to 80 designers; the team duplicates the old library and applies a new foundation so duplicated libraries mirror structure and naming, matches ~138 legacy colours down to a smaller accessible palette (five purples → one black), and uses Swipe Library to swap foundations and update mockups in seconds; documentation plus shared visual QA fixes the inevitable edge-case breaks.
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chapters (9)
- 0:00Rebranding challenge
- 2:34Aligning stakeholders
- 6:06Building on existing design systems
- 8:15Smooth transition
- 10:23Documenting ownership
- 12:31User delight focus
- 16:24Rebranding evolution
- 19:36Lessons learned
- 21:43Conclusion
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