One Acquia after acquisition
ADS was Acquia’s first attempt at a unified design system after the 2019 acquisitions of Mautic, Cohesion, and AgilOne. Those products brought distinct interfaces into the portfolio at a moment when Acquia needed to present itself as one digital experience platform, not a collection of acquired products.
I led the engineering work to give those experiences a shared look and feel. ADS became the component and convention layer used across eight products and internal tools, including Cloud Platform and Source.
Structure apart from framework
ADS separated shared styles and structure from framework-specific implementation, much as GEL does today. Built on Bootstrap, it published two packages: ads and ads-angular. The ads package defined design tokens, component styles, and assets. The ads-angular package implemented those components for Angular product code.
That boundary made the architecture extensible beyond Angular. We intended to add a React implementation without duplicating the visual language or the underlying component decisions.
The path to GEL
Widen’s acquisition in 2021 changed that plan by bringing its React-based Patterns design system into Acquia’s frontend portfolio. The company now had two mature systems, along with bespoke libraries from other acquired products, and needed a broader unification strategy.
ADS proved the value of a shared interface foundation and established the separation between common design decisions and framework code. GEL carries that architecture forward with a token-driven source of truth and first-class Angular and React packages.