Avexa
Avexa
Northstar Labs' product teams kept shipping inconsistent interfaces and rebuilding the same components across brands. I built Avexa, a multi-brand design system with flexible tokens and well-documented patterns that scale across products. It lets teams move faster while keeping every experience visually and functionally consistent.
Year
Client
Work type
Foundations
The first phase established shared decisions for color, spacing, motion, and product language across three related brands that had drifted apart over years of independent work. Getting these foundations right was the difference between a system people adopted and one they quietly ignored.
Instead of treating tokens as documentation, I paired each foundation with concrete usage examples so teams could see when to choose one pattern over another. Showing the reasoning, not just the values, made the system feel like guidance rather than constraint.
Balancing brands
Each brand needed enough room to feel distinct while still drawing from a common core, so I designed the tokens as a shared base with deliberate points of variation. That structure let the brands express personality without forking the system.
I tested the foundations against real screens from all three products to make sure the shared decisions held up under pressure. The edge cases we found early saved the teams from painful exceptions down the line.
Foundations
The first phase established shared decisions for color, spacing, motion, and product language across three related brands that had drifted apart over years of independent work. Getting these foundations right was the difference between a system people adopted and one they quietly ignored.
Instead of treating tokens as documentation, I paired each foundation with concrete usage examples so teams could see when to choose one pattern over another. Showing the reasoning, not just the values, made the system feel like guidance rather than constraint.
Balancing brands
Each brand needed enough room to feel distinct while still drawing from a common core, so I designed the tokens as a shared base with deliberate points of variation. That structure let the brands express personality without forking the system.
I tested the foundations against real screens from all three products to make sure the shared decisions held up under pressure. The edge cases we found early saved the teams from painful exceptions down the line.