Telstra Design System: Unifying Australia's Largest Telco
A unified design language across 20+ digital applications — built in 8 months, embedded inside Telstra's Sydney office with R/GA.
Overview
Telstra operates 20+ digital applications. When R/GA audited the full estate, only four had any design standards at all, and none of those four were consistent with each other.
Each lived in a different location, maintained manually, updated inconsistently. A designer or developer joining a new product team had almost nothing reliable to work from. The business cost was quantifiable: $1.5 million per project on average, 10 months end-to-end, 17 teams engaged per delivery. A unified design system was the clearest possible lever for reducing that overhead.
I joined as an Experience Designer within a six-person embedded team working from Telstra's Sydney office. My work covered motion design, interaction prototyping, accessibility specification, and cross-disciplinary collaboration across the two parallel workstreams that structured the project.
Selected Work
Treated accessibility as a structural principle, not a compliance layer.
With over $3 billion in annual purchasing decisions influenced by customers with specific or changing needs, accessibility wasn't optional. The team adopted an inclusive design framework across four dimensions (Touch, See, Hear, Speak) covering permanent, temporary, and situational impairments. I wrote component-level accessibility specifications and validated colour contrast across the gradient-heavy visual direction, ensuring WCAG AA compliance was embedded in the handoff, not appended to it.
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Ran two visual directions to resolution rather than picking one early.
The team developed two distinct territories: “Conversation” (a dialogue-driven, immersive UI built around Telstra’s Codi assistant) and “Light” (clean, open, flexible across diverse product contexts). Rather than choosing between them, we resolved them into “Light in Motion”: Light’s structural clarity with the dynamic brand energy of Conversation’s gradient language. The final system had the range to work on a guided NBN connection flow and a dense account management dashboard without compromising either.
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Built the motion language as engineering-ready specs, not mood reels.
Motion was central to what made the final design direction feel premium rather than flat. I led motion design and produced detailed After Effects prototypes covering macro-transitions, component microinteractions, and brand expression moments. These weren't conceptual demos. They were built at production fidelity with timing curves, easing specifications, and rules for when motion should be suppressed for accessibility or performance. Engineers had what they needed to implement without guessing.
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Stress-tested the system against five real customer moments before finalising anything.
Components that looked clean in isolation often behaved differently in complex layouts. Colour ratios that passed on a solid background needed recalculating on the gradient. Running the emerging system through actual lifecycle flows (getting connected, managing a service, getting help, upgrading, accessing entertainment) surfaced the places where the theory broke down. The final system was tougher for it.
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Structured the documentation to outlive the engagement.
An agency design system only has value if the client can own it after the agency leaves. The handoff documentation covered design rationale, interaction principles, motion specifications, foundational tokens, and component-level specs, with accessibility requirements embedded at the component level rather than isolated in a separate guide. The goal was a system Telstra's internal teams could extend without needing R/GA in the room.
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Outcomes
Took Telstra from 4 inconsistent, siloed style guides to a single unified design language across 20+ applications
WCAG AA compliance built into every component from the start, grounded in a real inclusive design framework rather than retrofitted
Motion language established as a first-class system element with engineering-ready specifications
Two full visual directions developed and prototyped before resolving into the final “Light in Motion” direction
System documented for adoption and extension by internal Telstra teams after the engagement ended
Addressed a delivery model costing an average of $1.5M per project across 17 teams, with the design system positioned to compress both
Full case study and motion prototype samples available on request.
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