Electrolux
Electrolux Shape – a Design System Ahead of Its Time
- Design System
About the project
When Design Systems Were Still Built by Hand Back in 2018, before Figma, before design tokens and variables, before platforms like Zeroheight or Supernova existed – design systems weren’t something you could buy, subscribe to or plug into a workflow. Sketch and Adobe XD ruled the design world, but they had no shared libraries in the cloud, no version control, no connection to code. If you wanted a design system, you had to build it yourself. From scratch. That’s exactly what Electrolux asked us to do. And it became one of Intunio’s first large-scale design system projects. We didn’t just design colours, components or icons – we built the ecosystem around them: the platform, the structure, the libraries, the process and the organisation that would own and evolve it.
From Fragmentation to a Shared Direction
To begin, we brought design leaders and UX managers from Sweden, Europe, South America and Asia to Stockholm for a four-day workshop. The goal was clear: align on why a design system was needed – and start building it together, not just in theory but in practice. The most defining moment was a full-scale design audit. Before the workshop, we had printed hundreds of screens and interface elements from Electrolux’s apps and digital products. Once everything was laid out across the tables – more than forty different button styles, conflicting colour palettes, multiple typographic systems, grids and icon styles varying between teams and regions – the fragmentation became undeniable. At that point, the question was no longer if a design system was needed, but how fast we could build it.
How the System Took Shape
We looked closely at the few public design systems that existed at the time – IBM Carbon, Microsoft Fluent and Google’s Material Design. They showed what a living system could be: components, principles and documentation in one accessible platform. But none of these tools could simply be used inside Electrolux. So we built our own version.
We created an internal web-based platform where the entire design system was collected – structure, components, colours, typography, examples and guidelines. Every component had its own page with visuals, interaction states, when to use it and how. The platform was powered by a lightweight CMS, so Electrolux could update and grow it themselves.
In parallel, we developed two complete UI libraries – one in Sketch and one in Adobe XD – because both tools were used globally across the organisation. Each component was built as a symbol with smart overrides, a consistent grid and manually defined spacing and type scales. This was before design tokens existed, but the principle was the same: reusable building blocks, a shared visual language.
We also built a searchable icon library with hundreds of icons in multiple formats, so teams around the world could easily find and use them. For the first time, design at Electrolux wasn’t something that lived in isolated files – it became a shared resource.
