Balancing identity and unity: Simplifying the complexities of three distinct brands into a scalable multi-brand design system.
BlackRock is one of the world's largest asset management firms, owning both iShares, its prominent ETF product line, and Aladdin, a leading risk management platform. Joining ustwo gave me the opportunity to contribute to a long-standing collaboration with BlackRock, where the main goal was to build a scalable multi-brand design system that unified the three brands, each maintaining its own individual design system. My team laid the groundwork for integrating BlackRock, iShares, and eventually Aladdin into the multi-brand system, ensuring it could evolve seamlessly. Our focus was on developing a unified, scalable solution that enhances brand consistency while maintaining flexibility across all of BlackRock’s platforms.
Internationalisation foundation development
When I joined the Design System team, they had already established the foundations for the individual brands, the shared foundations, and implemented key processes.
Leveraging my prior international experience with design systems in other languages, I was assigned a complex internationalisation (i18n) task to be completed over several sprints, which involved researching and identifying specific user needs across different regions, including considerations for accessibility.
As a result of this research, I created a set of best practices for content creation, design, and development, ensuring that users of our design system could easily follow these recommendations. I documented this in our Zeroheight platform, providing clear guidelines that supported consistent and effective internationalisation across all brands.
I also defined the potential follow-up tasks based on my findings.
Defining typographic standards for localisation
After establishing the groundwork for internationalisation, I moved on to other localisation (l10n) tasks, specifically defining the typographic fluid scale for the language groups I categorised across the BlackRock platforms. I based the categorisation on English as the default—reflecting the majority of native English speakers—followed by accent-supporting languages, APAC languages, and right-to-left (RTL) languages. This categorisation was later used by a colleague to explore and apply the type variables in Figma once they were released.
I began by defining the typographic scale for accent-supporting languages, incorporating a new line height to accommodate accents. Next, I conducted research on Japanese typography adapted for the web, identifying industry best practices and average font sizes and line heights. Using the Utopia fluid type scale and an Excel formula, I determined appropriate font sizes and line heights and then tested them on the developing BlackRock pilot site. Additionally, I created a section in Zeroheight for localised typography that could be updated with documentation as the team progressed on localisation tasks.
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ustwo
- Design
