The Aurora Design System

Overview

Develop a simple, iconic, and scalable design system in Figma for Thermo Fisher Scientific's instruments, ensuring clarity for both designers and developers.

The Challenge

Halfway through my 10 year tenure at Thermo Fisher/Life Technologies, there never seemed to be time develop a true design system. The UX team to hit the ground running, focusing on proving design's value in driving sales. As the company expanded - adding Ion Torrent, Thermo Scientific, and eventually, Gibco, design inconsistencies became evident. There were countless design guides, spec sheets, and assets - similar, yet slightly different -scattered everywhere. To unify our growing portfolio and strengthen brand identity, a comprehensive design system became essential.

The Approach

Together with the lead UI designer and team, the focus was to develop a new digital system with a unified look and feel, and that was adaptable across Thermo Fisher Scientific's product line. Together we performed a comprehensive internal audit of our existing design guides. We audited 3 main sub-brands: Gibco, Applied Biosystems, and Thermo Scientific (including their UI components). The focus of this audit included identifying:

1. All the diverse brands of embedded UIs over multiple years
2. Consistency between visuals, touch points, colors, and status indicators
3. What to simplify, modernize, and keep consistent across our new brand

Non Industry Evaluation

Once our internal audit was complete, it left us with an idea of what components would be needed for the new branded system. Next, we looked for ideas from a non-industry perspective. The process included exploring digital interactions that might happen outside the lab. Different designers split up and explored on their own. From there, we came back and shared our findings. The team then voted on the best ideas to include in our new designs.

Understanding Atomic Design Systems, and evolving design tools

Sometime before the audit, I had converted an existing pdf style guide into Symbols using Sketch. I had also been collaborating with another web team that was building a separate design system who had adopted the atomic design philosophy. I read Brad Frost's book about Atomic Design, and started implementing that philosophy and putting it into practice. I also shared my findings and hosted a few presentations on how this could work for the team. Until this point, we had been primarily using Sketch and Abstract. The web team I'd been working with moved to Figma and invited us along. This was a game changer. Using Figma's tools and the knowledge and experience gathered in the previous months, the pieces were now in place to build Aurora.

Aurora Use Case:

I set up the system according to the Atomic Design Philosophy - starting with Atoms through to Molecules and Organisms. This of course evolved as Figma added feature for Components and I started applying Variables (Design Tokens):

Aurora Use Case: Templates and Color Modes

Below are some sample screens of templates in Dark (default) and Light modes

Making it Useful for Designers and Developers

My experience as a designer/developer pushed me to include developers from the onset. At that time Figma had an advanced dev tool that provided accurate CSS and HTML code snippets directly within the Figma file that devs could copy and paste. I became a proponent of including design tokens so that we could lay the groundwork for color modes (Light and Dark). I started with a plug-in by Jan Six, and then moved to Variables and Dev-Mode when Figma rolled those tools out.

Out there in the world

Aurora Design System is a living document. The aim was to bring more consistency across our digital UI platforms, and so far, we've succeeded. With the system in place, it's easier for designers and devs to quickly establish a footing when getting started. To boot, the foundational structures are there and now it's more of a matter of selectively adding new components when the need calls for it. As of January of 2025, it contains 380 components and 17 design teams across the world are currently using it.