Aether
OS
Fourteen products, five teams, one visual language drifting apart a little more with every sprint. Aether OS is the design system and component runtime that pulled them back into orbit.
The
drift
An audit found 47 shades of the primary color, 31 button variants and four different date pickers in production. Every team had forked the old UI kit and quietly evolved it. The cost wasn't aesthetic — every divergence was a bug surface and a re-onboarding tax.
- Tokens as the single source: color, space, motion — versioned and published like code.
- Framework-agnostic core in Web Components, thin React/Vue bindings on top.
- Visual regression CI: a PR fails when a pixel drifts without a token change.
The
runtime
The unusual part: Aether ships as a runtime, not a zip file. Products import components from a versioned CDN channel — stable, beta, canary — and theming happens through cascading token layers resolved in the browser. A rebrand becomes a token release, not a quarter of engineering.
Documentation lives in the same monorepo and rebuilds on every merge, so the docs are never older than the code. Adoption went from mandate to pull: teams migrated because it was the fastest way to ship.