Challenge
Every region had its own Ford. None of them matched.
Ford's teams around the world were each designing their own version of the site. Same company, same brand, and a different experience depending on which country you were standing in. Every market was solving the same problems from scratch, so everything took longer than it should have, and some of it wasn't accessible at all. Nobody was wrong. There was no shared foundation to be right about. The job was to build one, get every region on it, and do it without stopping work already in motion.
The Solution
A system before systems were the playbook.
As Associate Creative Director leading Ford Credit, I ran a core team of six FTEs, a number that flexed as high as fifteen with freelancers whenever the timeline got hot.
We started with the pieces every region kept rebuilding: components, type, color, spacing, page templates, content rhythms. Each one got defined once and shared out, so a button in one market was the same button in the next. There was no playbook telling us to work this way. We were writing ours as we went.
North America went first. We built the full system there, the pages, the variants, the rules, and made it the reference for every region that followed. It was also our first step out of Photoshop: Ford became one of Sketch's early enterprise clients because we needed components at a scale nobody else was pushing yet.
Once the patterns across regions became clear, we brought strategy in to help support the next moves as we took this global.
Then we took it around the world, one region at a time. A few of us ran meetings around the clock, whatever hour a region needed. We'd present the North American model, walk through how it worked, and their team would build the local translation inside it. Same pages, same variants, their language and their market. None of these teams reported to us. The system spread because the local version was designed in, not fought over. Then the next region, and the next, until Ford was one Ford everywhere.
And we built it to leave it. Contribution guidelines, version control, documentation, training. The regional teams learned to run the system themselves, and when we stepped away, nothing fell.
We started in 2013. The industry named the practice a few years later.
By then, Ford was already running on it.
Inside the file
Built in Sketch
The Results
One Ford, everywhere. And it stayed that way after we left.
The system made the work faster and the sites consistent. Regions stopped rebuilding the same pieces from scratch, new pages came together from shared components, and accessibility became a standard instead of a regional accident. For the first time, Ford looked and worked like one company online.
The proof was in what the regions shipped. The same foundation held the emotional work and the practical work: a Mustang page built to make you want one, and a vehicle detail page built to help you buy one. Different jobs, different markets, one system underneath.
The part I'm proudest of is what happened after. The regional teams kept the system running on their own, and the foundation carried Ford's digital work for years. I've spent the decade since building design systems at companies you'd know. This is where I learned the whole job: the system is easy compared to the alignment, and the alignment is the work.
The first system I helped build, leading Ford Credit. The reason I've built every one since.