Joshua Hughes

In this session, we’ll walk through Nutmeg’s real-world journey in building a scalable, multi-themed design system that powers both the Nutmeg app and the Chase UK app. This case study explores how we tackled the challenge of white-labelling — enabling multiple branded user experiences from a single codebase — by deeply integrating design tokens and modular architecture into our Android development process. We’ll start by clarifying key concepts: - What is white-labelling and why does it matter? - What is a design system and how do tokens power them? We’ll then dive into our approach, detailing how we adopted principles from Material Design and Figma, to create a system of Global, Semantic and Component tokens to use in design and development. From a technical perspective, we’ll show how we built a custom theming system for both XML and Jetpack Compose and how it’s used in our components and screens. We’ll discuss our use of Gradle modules for clean separation of concerns, and how we support themed compose previews in Android Studio. We'll conclude the talk by reflecting on how the changes we've made have ultimately improved the experience for both developers and designers. We'll highlight the most significant challenges we encountered along the way—and share the key lessons we learned through overcoming them. These insights not only shaped the outcome of the project but also influenced how we work together going forward.