Design Systems · Design Leadership

Coca-Cola Consolidated Design System

Design standards that live in a PDF get ignored, and standards nobody owns drift. This program built both halves at once: a Design Council with the authority to set the standard, and a working component library that made the standard the thing teams actually built from.

Role: Founder & Chair, Design Council; Lead UI/UX Designer
Org: Coca-Cola Consolidated
Deliverables: Design Council Charter, Digital Brand Guide & component library

See it runningThe component library is a working prototype you can click through, not a static mockup.

Open the live component library →

5+business units represented on the council

14+component categories documented in the library

Monthlycouncil reviews against one documented standard

The Challenge

Coca-Cola Consolidated is the largest Coca-Cola bottler in the United States, with digital properties, internal platforms, and branded experiences spanning IT, Marketing, eCommerce, Corporate Communications, HR, Equipment Services, Red Classic, CONA, Data Ventures, and Corporate Services. Each function was making its own design decisions. There was no shared standard, no cross-functional visibility, and no governing body to check that what shipped was consistent, on-brand, or strategically aligned.

The Coca-Cola Company maintains comprehensive brand standards at the parent level, but nobody had translated them into actionable guidance for the teams building digital products at the bottler level. The result was brand drift at enterprise scale: inconsistent color application, typography drift, and brand treatments that varied from property to property. Not dramatic, but persistent, and expensive to unwind.

Fixing that took two things that usually get treated as separate projects. A standard needs a forum with the authority to enforce it, and that forum needs something concrete to enforce.

Governance

The Design Council: who decides, how work gets reviewed, and how progress is measured.

System

The Digital Brand Guide: the documented standard, built as a component library teams copy from.

Governance: the Design Council

I founded and chaired the Coca-Cola Consolidated Design Council, a cross-functional governance body with representation from 5+ business units, meeting monthly. I authored the Design Council Charter, the formal document that set the council's scope, objectives, methodology, compliance strategy, and KPI framework. It was written for executive leadership, IT leadership, business leaders, the PMO, and enterprise architects, and structured to live as a versioned, annually reviewed organizational document.

The charter set four core objectives: Responsive and Adaptive Design, Design Assessment and Standardization, Strategic Business Alignment, and Design Consolidation. Each had expected outcomes tied to measurable KPIs: scale of design influence across the organization, growth in design-related investment, depth of embedded design process, executive-level design representation, and integration of design into innovation culture. The compliance strategy made Brand Impact Assessments and Brand Compliance Reviews standing functions of the council, so progress was measured over time instead of judged by opinion.

System: the Digital Brand Guide

The Digital Brand Guide is the standard the council governed. I started with research into The Coca-Cola Company's official brand standards (color, typography, logo usage, photography, accessibility, and brand voice) and translated them into practical guidance for the teams doing the daily work at Coca-Cola Consolidated.

The guide documents the complete approved palette with hex and RGB values for every color, sets TCCC Unity as the primary typeface with Arial as the brand-specified web-safe fallback, defines logo usage including approved colorways and spacing, and codifies the brand voice as Authentic, Expert, and Trusted. A set of Do's and Don'ts makes the guidance portable, so it applies the same way no matter who is building or which property they are working on.

It was built as a working component library rather than a PDF, covering 14-plus component categories from buttons and data grids to charts and cards. That way the standard and the thing engineers actually copied from were the same artifact.

A rule that shows the thinkingCoca-Cola Red never carries a negative meaning. Error and warning states use orange and yellow instead, so the brand's most identity-defining color is never the thing telling someone they made a mistake.

How the two halves worked together

The clearest example came out of a Brand Compliance Review. Designers and teams across departments were each using a slightly different shade of Coca-Cola red. The review surfaced it, and the council standardized on one red across the teams it represented. Because the guide's palette documents that red with exact hex and RGB values, the decision had a reference anyone could check against instead of living in meeting notes.

It is a small example on its own, but it is exactly the kind of inconsistency that compounds silently across a large organization. The council gave the standard a forum with authority. The library gave the council something concrete to point at. Neither works without the other.

The Outcome

Coca-Cola Consolidated got a recurring forum, meeting monthly for the better part of a year, where stakeholders from 5+ business units reviewed work against one documented standard instead of individual judgment calls. Internal teams, vendors, and agency partners got a shared reference covering 14-plus component categories, so design decisions that had been made by instinct or personal preference could be checked against an approved standard.

The charter remains a versioned organizational document, built to outlast any single contributor's time on the council.