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Splash: a design system built to evolve

Splash is the design system behind Omnicom’s (formerly IPG’s) marketing platform, rebuilt in 2020 for an industry that never stops changing. Through three rebrands and an acquisition, it has kept 30+ products in step, from white-labeled agency platforms to one unified brand, Omni+, and in 2024 it moved to design tokens to make the next change faster still. After helping build its foundation, I’ve guided how it grows, from maintenance and documentation to every new expansion.

Role
Design system lead
Company
IPG, now Omnicom
Timeline
2020 – present
Scope
30+ products, 22+ agencies
Team
Emily Chu, Director of Product Design
Piotr Brzezinski, Product Designer
The OMNI+ product shell tilted on a pale blue background, with Splash semantic token callouts such as surface/brand and text/brand pinned to the elements they color, and the Brand primitive ramp below
Semantic tokens at work: each callout names the token and the primitive it points to.

The problem

In the marketing industry, brands rarely stand still. Holding companies are constantly reshaping themselves through mergers, acquisitions and reorganizations, and every shift can mean a new name, a new identity or a new parent company. IPG’s products were built on a legacy design system that couldn’t keep up: the same platform also had to be white-labeled for every agency, and any change to color or type meant hunting through products screen by screen. Change was the only constant, so the design system had to be built to adapt.

My role

As part of the original team behind the 2020 redesign, I helped build Splash’s foundation. From there, I took ownership of it: maintaining, expanding and documenting the system through every rebrand that followed. That work spans the component library, usage guidelines, the process teams use to request and ship new components and, since 2024, the token system.

One system, many brands

Over my years at the company, the brand behind our platform changed again and again:

  1. 2020KinessoLegacy design system redesigned as the foundation for Splash
  2. Rebrand 1Kinesso refreshA new Kinesso identity launches
  3. Rebrand 2InteractPlatform is rebranded as Interact
  4. TodayOmni+After the Omnicom acquisition, one unified brand

A rebrand isn’t one change, it’s hundreds of screens changing at once. Splash kept them consistent, and its move to tokens turned that into a single update.

Tokens built for change

After years of rebrands, we moved Splash to design tokens in 2024. Emily Chu, our Director of Product Design, led the tokenization effort, and as the design system lead I worked alongside her to bring it into Splash.

The result is a layered token system. Primitives hold the raw values, like the twelve steps of the Brand ramp. Semantic tokens describe what a color is for, like surface/brand or text/strongest, and point to a primitive. Components only ever use semantic tokens.

That separation is what makes a rebrand efficient: swap the primitive values for a new brand and every button, table and chart updates with it, with no component changes. The same token names carry both the Splash and Interact palettes side by side.

Splash tokens side by side: the Brand color primitives Brand900 to Brand15 with Splash and Interact values for each step, the type token table mapping heading styles to Assistant for Interact and Inter for Omni, and two specimen cards showing Assistant and Inter
One set of token names, multiple brands: Splash and Interact colors, Assistant and Inter type.

Hand-drawn empty states

Data-heavy platforms can feel cold, so the empty states are where Splash adds some humanity. Each one is hand-drawn, from simple icons to a runaway unicorn on the 404 page.

A set of hand-drawn Splash empty state illustrations on tilted cards: No tables, No graphs, Error, Maintenance, No Permissions, Your data is up to date, a No Projects card with a unicorn looking through binoculars, and a large 404 card with unicorns and the line Our unicorns must have run off with this page!
A few of the hand-drawn empty states, including the 404 page’s runaway unicorns.

Color that scales to any chart

Data-heavy products need far more colors than a brand palette provides, so data visualization got its own ordered palettes: a Splash set that stays distinguishable from 1 up to 60 series, and monochrome, analogous and complementary sets for Omni.

Data visualization color order sheets: donut charts showing the Splash palette from 1 to 60 colors, and OMNI monochrome, analogous and complementary palettes
Color order for data visualization, from one series to sixty.

Here’s the palette in motion, in a data visualization demo that won Indigo Awards Digital Design of the Year in 2023.

Data Visualization Demo

Indigo Awards Digital Design of the Year · 2023

Splash in-product

A look at real product screens built entirely from Splash components and tokens.

The Omni+ Audience Builder screen: a cart of data segments on the left, an audience definition with Individuals and Households tabs and AND/OR logic in the center, and a Session Manager panel on the right
The Omni+ Fuse screen: a Similarity Test with collapsible category panels, a donor question table, a diverging bar chart comparing donor and recipient frequency and weight, and an AI Analyze Chart panel summarizing top influencers
The Omni+ Client Central screen for a client: tabs for General information, Brands & Products and more, with an expandable brands table showing products by market, category, cost model and line of business, plus an inline warning that a brand is used elsewhere

Outcome

Splash has carried the platform through every rebrand since 2020 and now underpins 30+ products across 22+ agencies. We began by white-labeling the product for each agency; today it’s one unified platform with a single brand, Omni+. With tokens in place since 2024, the next rebrand is a change of values, not a redesign.

There’s no final version of Splash. It’s a living system, built to keep evolving for as long as the platform does.

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