Four brands. One fragmented experience.
Minnesota Public Radio operates four distinct digital properties — MPR News, The Current, Carbon Sound, and Your Classical — each serving a different audience with radically different aesthetics, yet all sitting under the same organizational umbrella.
The problem: no shared design language, inconsistent component libraries, and experiences that felt disconnected from each other and from modern listener expectations. Users moving between brands found no familiar anchors. The product team had no scalable foundation to build on.
One system. Four voices.
The goal was not uniformity — it was coherence. Each brand needed to retain its distinct personality while sharing an underlying architecture that made design and development faster, more consistent, and more accessible.
This meant building a design system flexible enough to express "breaking news" and "classical serenity" from the same foundational components — adapting tone through color, typography, and imagery rather than reinventing structure.
Systematic thinking, brand-first execution.
The work began with deep listening: audience research for each brand, competitive audits of public media digital products, and an inventory of every existing UI pattern across all four properties. From there, the process moved through three deliberate phases.
Audit & Architecture
Catalogued every screen, component, and interaction pattern across all four platforms. Identified redundancies, gaps, and opportunities for shared infrastructure without sacrificing brand distinction.
System Design
Built a flexible token-based design system in Figma — shared spacing, typography scales, interaction states, and accessibility rules — with brand-specific color and type layers applied on top.
Brand Expressions
Applied the system to each brand individually, designing high-fidelity screens for each property that felt fully native to their audience while communicating the underlying coherence of the platform family.
Same foundation. Different worlds.
Each brand received a fully realized digital expression — from home screens to content detail pages — all built on the shared system but unmistakably its own.
Authoritative, immediate, essential — built for urgency.
Bold, electric, culturally curious — built for discovery.
Atmospheric, raw, deep — built for immersion.
Refined, timeless, elegant — built for contemplation.
Outcomes that endure.
A scalable design system that unified the experience across four distinct brands while preserving the individuality that makes each one resonate with its audience. The system reduced design and development overhead while enabling each brand to evolve independently within a coherent framework.