Ford Design System
A tool for designers and developers
When the first Mustang Mach-E prototypes rolled into the studio, our screens told three different stories. The tablet UI in the cabin spoke one dialect, the marketing site another, the mobile app a third. If a single vehicle could feel that fragmented, what chance did the larger Ford ecosystem have? We needed a lingua franca—one that any designer, developer, or marketer could speak without an accent.
Ford wanted customers to feel one continuous journey—from research site to showroom to dashboard—we’d need more than guidelines; we’d need a shared DNA.
We began not with components but with meaning. Ford’s brand pillars—freedom of movement, human focus, engineering grit—were stripped down to color values, typographic rhythms, animation principles, even the weight of a click-sound. Those elements became the alphabet of a design language we called the Ford Design System, or FDS.
The real transformation wasn’t visual; it was cultural. Designers stopped debating “which blue?” and started trading motion presets. Design reviews faded into peer critiques—more jazz session than courtroom. Slack channels became the busiest hallway at Ford, buzzing around the clock as Melbourne handed off to Detroit, Detroit to London. The system turned geography into time zones, time zones into momentum.
Because the design language was now programmable, evolution became a feature, not a threat. Change the corner radius token in one place and a thousand buttons around the world softened overnight. No global memo, no scramble; just a collective, silent upgrade—like the brand taking a deep, even breath.
Today FDS is less a toolkit than a shared habit of mind. It lets a designer in Mexico City and an engineer in Palo Alto build separately yet ship something that feels as if one hand drew it. Customers don’t notice the framework, of course; they simply sense a seamlessness that reinforces trust. And that was always the goal: to make every Ford interaction—whether on a watch face, a truck display, or a browser—feel like chapters of the same story.
The badge on the grille unites the hardware; FDS unites the experience.
Team
Andrew McClellan
| Experience Design Director & Group Creative Director
Aaron May
| Experience Desiger & Creative Director
Adam Forrester
| Director Experience Design
Andrew Guisgand
| Senior User Experience Designer
Anthony Moore
| Senior User Experience Designer
Frank Melendez
| Senior Experience Designer
Scott Underwood
| Senior Experience Designer
Katie Hicks
| Senior Experience Copywriter
Thorin Messer
| Engineering Manager
Sam Thompson
| Technology Specialist
Henrick Holm
| Technology Specialist
Sophia Andreadis
| Senior Project Manager
Beverly Fountain
| Project Manager
