Woven by Toyota
Carrying a global rebrand through the design system
Role — Senior UX Designer, Design Systems & Component Architecture Context
2022–2023, ~18 months
Focus — System foundations · Design tokens · Component gallery · Public web · Legacy & internal tool migration
Overview
In April 2023, Woven Planet Holdings became Woven by Toyota, re-anchoring Toyota's mobility-software subsidiary directly to the parent brand. Most of the company experienced this as a new name and logo. For design, it meant every surface the company owned now had to look like it belonged to Toyota: the public site, the careers experience, internal employee tools, and a long tail of legacy apps built before any shared standard existed.
At that scale, doing it by hand guarantees drift. Each team interprets the new brand a little differently, and you end up with a fractured experience that undercuts the credibility the Toyota association was supposed to buy. The rename gave us the mandate to fix that properly: build the design system into the mechanism that could carry the brand change across every product at once, and keep carrying it afterward.
Challenge
The rename touched far more than a typical refresh:
-
Many surfaces — public web, careers, internal tools, legacy apps — each with its own history and constraints.
-
Globally distributed product and brand teams who would otherwise each reinterpret the identity on their own.
-
Legacy debt: older tools that couldn't be thrown away or fully rebuilt on a rebrand timeline.
-
No single source of truth, which left every color, type, and spacing decision as a per-team judgment call.
The constraint that shaped everything: deliver a consistent, accessible, on-brand experience across all of it, on a tight timeline, and keep it inexpensive to maintain once the launch dust settled.
Approach
1. A token-first foundation.
I rebuilt the foundations as design tokens — the source of truth for color, typography, spacing, and motion — structured in layers (primitive → semantic → component) so the brand expression sat apart from the components using it. With that in place, a brand change becomes an edit to the source that propagates downstream automatically, not a manual sweep across hundreds of screens. The 2023 rename was the proof: the new identity flowed through the system instead of being hand-applied product by product.
2. A documented component gallery.
I built and maintained the component library that every team designed and built from. Each component documented its usage, states, accessibility, and design-to-dev parity, so building on-brand was simply easier than going off-system. As the gallery filled in, the rate of one-off treatments dropped on its own.
3. Rebuilding the public web on the system.
The public site and careers experience were rebuilt on the new tokens and components, with a responsive, accessible layout and a cleaner application flow. Because it sat on the system, the brand rollout and the UX improvements shipped together rather than as two competing projects.
4. Migrating legacy tools.
The harder, less visible half. I brought legacy apps onto the new standard without full rewrites — prioritizing by visibility and effort, mapping each tool's existing patterns onto the new token set, and bridging old conventions incrementally so nothing stalled the roadmap while the surfaces stopped looking like a different company.
5. Bringing internal tools into the system.
Employee-facing tools came under the same system, so the people building Woven's products worked in interfaces as considered as the external ones. It also killed a lot of duplicated effort — internal teams pulled from the same gallery and tokens instead of maintaining their own divergent styling
Results
-
Brand change shipped as a system update — the rename propagated across hundreds of surfaces through token updates rather than screen-by-screen rework.
-
Zero breaking changes — the foundation was modernized while keeping 37 legacy products live, with no breakage across dependent surfaces.
-
Consistency at scale — 70% of core product flows brought onto the shared system, sharply reducing off-system one-offs.
-
Faster design-to-dev — documented, dev-ready components cut handoff churn and rework.
What it demonstrates
A company-wide brand change is usually a multi-team fire drill. Here it was closer to a routine update, because the system was built to absorb it: tokens as the source of truth, a documented gallery as the shared vocabulary, and a migration plan that took legacy reality seriously instead of pretending it away. That's the throughline I bring to every system I build.
