Nebula, an Intelligent System
Design Systems • Experience Strategy • Product Design • Branding • Project Management • 0 to 1
As a product & practice Nebula continues to drive connectivity, consistency, and culture.
Overview
Nebula is a design system (DS) that was created alongside CoreAI, a proprietary tool for Publicis Groupe (the world’s second-largest advertising holding company). CoreAI enabled teams to connect AI models to build flexible, custom workflows.
The Opportunity
Publicis Groupe set its sights on becoming an AI leader in advertising, sparking the creation of CoreAI. The platform sat at the center of Groupe's growth agenda, aiming to serve 80k+ employees and strategic client partners. Facilitated through a $100M-a-year program, what started as workshops and ideation sessions became seven product-oriented delivery (POD) teams.
The immediate challenge was delivery. Teams needed ready-to-use components to move quickly, stay consistent, and meet MVP deadlines. But the larger goal was to create a scalable system people could confidently reference and build within.
My Contribution
→ I co-built Nebula's strategic direction, creating protocols and operational models used to steer the design system practice. Detailed in Nebula's Goverance & Protocols.
→ I led accessibility for Midnight, Nebula's gradient-heavy dark theme and its largest compliance risk, auditing 130+ color combinations to set the standard POD teams built against. Detailed in the Nebula's Contrast Verification section.
→ I built WCAG 2.0 compliant components with detailed documentation/annotations and established a design-to-engineering handoff process. Available via the Nebula Reference Site.
→ I led retrospectives to recognize individual contributions and identify opportunities for continuous team improvement.
→ I collaborated with a team of 3 to stand up Nebula's Reference Site. An AI governed system pairing a CMS with a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) assistant and generative canvas rooted in the system's rules, gudiance, and design elements. Built to align teams and connect siloed tools.
Full Approach
Nebula began with a clear purpose, to help CoreAI go from 0 to 1. With confirmation of the pilot product, securing leadership buy-in for funding/resourcing was critical in order to establish a fully dedicated DS team. To achieve this, I collaborated with our Associate Creative Director (ACD) to develop decks outlining feasibility risks, capacity/financial plans, and samples of Nebula. This effort resulted in successful buy-in and formation of our team.
As both the DS and the POD teams matured, I built out the design system practice (e.g. branding workshops, governance models, and LoE assessments) aimed at facilitating structure needed to effectivley work within Nebula and integrate into CoreAI’s product development cycles. This established a tighter synergy between the system and product teams allowing Nebula to evolve alongside CoreAI, while POD teams delivered a timley MVP.
Agentic Governance Enabling Connectivity
It became clear that keeping Nebula aligned with the product while minimizing tech debt meant continuously refining our practice. But our current processes only went so far, larger challenges still remained: aligning global teams, maintaining consistency without limiting flexibility, guidance scattered across tools, rules being too dense to quickly absorb, and designers falling back on assumptions under tight delivery timelines.
That gap led to the idea of an agentic design system. One place where builders could author governance, get role-aware contextual guidance, generate governed AI concepts, and translate those ideas into code or Figma-ready designs. A RAG assistant, generative canvas, and CMS documentation console power these capabilities, allowing designers to effectively move through the product lifecycle with a system that can keep pace with product development.
Adapt, Refine, Scale
Our team embraced the belief that a design system is never truly finished. Nebula helped accelerate CoreAI’s MVP build while establishing an enterprise standard for how teams design and build alongside a DS. Through continued iteration and global evangelism, Nebula continues to adapt to Publicis Groupe’s broader AI ambitions.
Today, Nebula supports 50+ designers across three continents, with 40+ components, 100+ tokens, and two custom themes. Its influence has also expanded into AEGIS, a new offering built from the practices and capabilities established through Nebula. What started as a system for a single product has grown into a foundation for new ways of working, with connectivity and innovation at the core of what comes next.
