Dixons Carphone Multiplay Design System
The TL;DR
The details
The challenge
Dixons Carphone's multiplay proposition — combining mobile, broadband and home telephone into a single comparison experience — needed to live across multiple brands in their portfolio. Carphone Warehouse, Currys PC World and Mobiles.co.uk each had their own distinct visual language, colour systems and brand personality. Yet the underlying product - comparing and switching telecoms services was experiential and structurally identical across all three.
The challenge wasn't to design three separate platforms. It was to design one system rigorous enough to underpin all of them, while remaining flexible enough that each brand felt authentically itself rather than a reskin of something else.
My role
As Lead Designer, I was responsible for the architecture and delivery of the multi-brand design system, from initial component strategy through to brand adoption and asset delivery across all three platforms. The work ran from 2018 through to early 2019.
Building for brand adoption from the ground up
The core design decision was to treat this as a systems problem first, and a product problem second. Rather than designing for Carphone Warehouse and adapting later, I built the component architecture with multi-brand adoption as a first principle from day one.
Using the Atomic Design methodology in Sketch, I constructed the system from the ground up — defining components at the atomic level: colour tokens, typography scales, spacing systems, interactive states, and component variants. Critically, these foundational decisions were made brand-agnostic — the structure of every component was designed to accept different visual languages without requiring structural change.
The result was a theming layer that sat on top of the shared component architecture. Each brand — Carphone Warehouse, Currys PC World and Mobiles.co.uk — had its own distinct colour system, typographic personality and visual language. But all three drew from the same underlying component set. Switching from one brand to another was a matter of applying the relevant theme, not rebuilding the interface.
What the system had to support
Each brand presented a distinct design challenge within the system:
Carphone Warehouse — the primary brand and the foundation the system was initially built around. Clean, direct, telecoms-focused.
Currys PC World — a retail-first brand with a bold, high-contrast visual language and a broader product audience. The system needed to accommodate its stronger colour palette and more assertive typographic style without compromising the structural integrity of the comparison components.
Mobiles.co.uk — a digitally-native, value-focused brand with a different tone and visual density to the retail brands. The system needed to flex to a lighter, more transactional aesthetic while keeping the comparison experience consistent and trustworthy.
Across all three, the core comparison components — package cards, filter systems, CTA patterns, form elements — remained structurally consistent. What changed was everything that made each brand feel like itself.
Launch and Impact
By December 2017 — just ahead of the project period — Dixons Carphone's multiplay proposition had grown to a 10% share of the UK switching market, cited in their official interim results. Carphone Warehouse held a 22% postpay mobile market share and a 78% brand consideration rating — the commercial context the design system was built to serve.
By December 2017 — just ahead of the project period — Dixons Carphone's multiplay proposition had grown to a 10% share of the UK switching market, cited in their official interim results. Carphone Warehouse held a 22% postpay mobile market share and a 78% brand consideration rating — the commercial context the design system was built to serve.
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