Aspire Design System

Before Aspire, F&G had no formal design system — just 7 brand colors, 4 of which failed WCAG contrast on white, a handful of inconsistent components, and no shared source of truth. Every new pattern was rebuilt from scratch, and non-technical teams who needed an on-brand asset, a color combination, or a pattern had no way to get one without opening a ticket and waiting on a designer.

I built Aspire as F&G's first real design system: a component library, a token structure, and contribution guidelines a growing team could actually follow. The highest-leverage piece was the color work — using the OKLCH color space and an EightShapes contrast-grid methodology, I expanded the 7-color brand palette into an 80-color token architecture, with every color mapped to the contrast it passes. 25 of those pass contrast for body text on white (7 at AA, 18 at AAA), up from 3 — so teams know which colors are safe for text and which are for large type, UI, or decoration.

To make that usable by people who aren't designers, I shipped three self-service tools — including a color grid tool and a pattern-fill tool — so marketing and sales teams could generate accessible color pairings and branded patterns themselves (more on the self-service tools). Sustaining the system also meant building the team: I founded F&G's UX function and grew it from 1 to 5 people, with its own design-ops framework and documentation standards — the full story of building that team.

Before Aspire, every color pairing, pattern, and on-brand asset a non-designer needed was a ticket in the design queue. The self-service tools took those routine requests out of the queue entirely, so designers spent less time fielding look-ups and more time designing. And with 25 text-safe colors instead of 3, and every one of the 80 tokens labelled with what it can be used for, they had far more room to create without guessing at accessibility.

• The brand palette grew from 7 to 80 colors, each mapped to the contrast it passes.
• Colors usable for body text on white grew from 3 to 25 (7 at AA, 18 at AAA).
• Three self-service tools removed routine requests from the design queue entirely.
• The UX team grew 5x, with a documented contribution process that didn't exist before.
• Aspire is still the design system F&G runs on today.