Branding

One design system across retail, web and point of sale

A shared design system and refreshed identity for Lumen Retail, cutting feature delivery time across three product teams by 40%.

Client: Lumen Retail
Industry: Retail
Discipline: Branding
Year: 2025
Duration: 4 months

The challenge

Lumen ran three frontends: the public site, the customer account area and the in-store point of sale. Each had its own buttons, its own blue, and its own idea of what a form error looked like. Six years of independent decisions had produced three products that did not look related.

The cost was not aesthetic. Every change was implemented three times, and the in-store system had drifted far enough that staff training had to cover the differences explicitly.

What we did

We started with an audit: 41 button variants, 17 blues, four typefaces. Then we agreed a single set of tokens, chose one typeface, and rebuilt the twelve components that accounted for most of the interface surface.

The identity refresh was intentionally small. A tightened wordmark, one accent colour, and a type scale that works at point-of-sale distances as well as on a phone. No rebrand announcement, no new logo story.

Delivery was incremental. Each team adopted tokens first, then components, one release at a time, so nothing had to stop for a big-bang migration.

Design systems fail when they are delivered as a finished artefact and handed over. This one was adopted in the order that suited each team: tokens first, because they are cheap to swap in, then components where a rewrite was already planned.

The audit numbers did most of the persuading. It is difficult to argue for seventeen blues once somebody has printed all seventeen on one page.

Results