Ford + Lincoln
I joined the in-vehicle design team at Ford during an interesting, transformative time. The Mach E Mustang was revealed a few months before I joined with a brand new neumorphic design language. Sketch was relatively new to the org (there were even some photoshop files still floating around). Our digital experience team was trying to break down barriers between disciplines.
Enter Android Automotive
The real fun began about 6 months in when we learned that we were going to build our new platform on Android Automotive. All we knew at this time was that our engineers had to rebuild our infotainment systems from the ground up - and we saw this as a huge opportunity to modernize and make updates without needing to worry about tech debt.
My responsibilities
I was the design lead for the home screen, phone + messaging apps, settings menu, and system UI. I also helped build V1 of our first in-vehicle, multi-brand, screen-size agnostic design system.
I can only share what Ford releases, so check out some of these photos and videos below.
Latest state of the design system
Jack and I co-built the first version of the design system using Sketch and Invision. His team has been doing some amazing work refining it in Figma since then.
Check out their talk at Config to get a behind the scenes look!
2024 Lincoln Nautilus
This is the first vehicle revealed with our new Android Automotive infotainment system. I was focused primarily on the centerstack touchscreen display.
2025 Ford Explorer
The Explorer is built using the same system, with slightly different and less-cosmic styling than the Lincoln system. For the first time ever, the back-end is shared so general functionality and layouts are exactly the same between brands.
