An Alienware monitor showing Dell x AI inside a soft blue-to-magenta glowing rounded ring.

Dell's AI Design Language

Giving Dell's AI its own look, behavior and rules

Dell wanted shopping to feel less like searching and more like asking. We spent three months turning that idea into a design language for AI, and it now runs on Dell.com's Virtual Assistant for consumer and commercial customers.

  • Shipped
  • Design Systems
  • AI Experience
  • Interaction Design
  • Visual Design

TL;DR

Problem
Dell had no shared design language for AI, and consumer and commercial customers need very different things from it.
What we did
Built one AI framework, with principles, tokens, components and three surfaces, and launched it through the Virtual Assistant.
My part
Defined the AI foundations, including color, typography, spacing and corner radii, rebuilt the Virtual Assistant components, and now consult for every team adopting the language.

Impact & Outcomes

One AI design language across Dell. Live on the Virtual Assistant throughout Dell.com, for consumer and commercial customers, and in internal AI tools.

  • Game Changer Award, presented by Dell's Senior Director of Design

  • Vision to live MVP in 3 months

  • Around 15 teams building on the Virtual Assistant, with more on the way

  • Two designers defined the full foundation

  • 8 AI-native principles guiding every team that adopts it

  • Every color and gradient checked against WCAG in light and dark mode

Organisation
Dell Technologies
My role
Senior Product Designer
AI foundations and documentation, Virtual Assistant components, plus design consultant for adopting teams.
Duration
Jan 2026 to Present
Collaborators
Winston Toy (Lead Designer)
Virtual Assistant team
Dell Design Systems
Dell Accessibility team
Recognition
Game Changer Award, Dell

Beyond the search bar

Buying a computer online still starts with filters and spec sheets, which only works if you already know what you need. The original vision flipped that, with a full-page AI assistant that builds the whole journey around you, all the way to checkout.

Winston Toy, the lead designer, asked me to join the tiger team. We'd worked together for close to five years, and once I saw how far this would reach across Dell, I couldn't wait to start.

The new AI design language on Dell.com's Virtual Assistant, desktop and mobile. On desktop, a gradient header bar tops a Dell Pro 14 Laptop product card with price and Add to Cart, beside a chat where the assistant suggests a configuration for office use and answers how much RAM is needed, with an Upgrade RAM to 32 GB button. On mobile, the same assistant shows the Dell Pro 14 card and a Why choose it summary.
The new design language on the Virtual Assistant, desktop and mobile

Rules before pixels

Before designing a single screen, we wrote down how AI should behave at Dell. Every later decision came back to these eight principles.

Build the Experience Around You: every surface adapts to the user's role, intent and journey. A blue-to-magenta ring.
Conversations, Not Clicks: interactions feel like co-creation, not transactions. Three offset chat-bubble outlines.
Motion is Meaning: generative motion signals intelligence, clarity and delight. Four small rings in a wave.
Trust by Design: memory, reasoning and recommendations are transparent and explainable. A glowing rounded square.
Multimodal, Always: voice, touch and text work together seamlessly, with no one-channel UX. Rounded bars like a voice waveform.
Artifacts Over Pages: users leave with tangible outputs, such as proposals, configs and visuals, built with AI. Stacked downward triangles.
Delight in the Details: subtle playfulness and brand personality spark joy, without gimmicks. A ring with a playful face of rounded shapes.
Ethics Made Visible: responsible AI choices are surfaced in the UI, not hidden in policy pages. A plus sign of two rounded bars.
The eight AI-native design principles behind every surface

Upgrading what was there

Leadership liked the vision but saw a faster path. Dell.com already had a Virtual Assistant on every page, with far less AI behind it than it could support.

So we upgraded it instead of building something new. The full-page experience went on hold, and the language got a real product to prove itself on. The MVP shipped in March 2026.

Before: the old Virtual Assistant, marked Beta, with a Request Repair form for a PowerEdge R660 in flat white cards on the left and a pastel chat panel on the right with You and Virtual Assistant labels and a boxed text field.
Virtual Assistant before
After: the same Request Repair flow in the new language, with a blue-to-magenta gradient header, a larger PowerEdge R660 product card on soft tinted panels, chat bubbles for the customer's messages and a rounded input with a gradient send button.
Virtual Assistant after

Different, but still Dell

This was the hardest problem. The AI had to stay unmistakably Dell while feeling like a step forward.

I got to the gradient through a lot of experimentation, keeping Dell blue as the anchor and adjusting the magenta until it felt modern. The tricky part was making it work on light and dark themes while still passing accessibility standards. Now, wherever AI appears on Dell.com, people know it right away, and it still feels like Dell.

The Virtual Assistant open beside Dell.com's Laptop Computers page. The page keeps Dell's own header, filters and product cards, while the assistant's side panel has a blue-to-magenta gradient header and gradient sparkle icons, suggesting a Dell Pro 14 configuration for office use and an Upgrade RAM to 32 GB option.
The AI gradient, next to Dell's brand on Dell.com

The foundations

I owned the foundations, for consumers and commercial users alike.

  • Color. Every scale built by hand in Figma, with each color and gradient checked against WCAG in light and dark mode.
  • Typography. Dell's new typeface, with rules for how it behaves in a conversation.
  • Spacing. Designed mobile-first to keep three busy surfaces readable in a small space.
  • Corner radii. Curved edges on the side panel make it feel like part of the page you're on, instead of a separate experience.
  • Documentation. Started in Figma and now moving into Dell Design Systems' online docs.
Foundation sheets stacked like cards over a blue-to-magenta glow: a purple corner-radius scale, a row of icons, color scales in blue, green, yellow and red, and the AI gradient scale from light pastel to near black. In front, a spacing sheet defines an 8 by 8px page grid for positions, dimensions, padding and margins, and a 4 by 4px component grid.
Color scales, typography, spacing and corner radii

Three ways to talk to Dell

One chat window can't do everything, so the assistant has three surfaces and moves between them based on what you're trying to do.

  • Side panel for quick questions, without leaving the page
  • Full screen for deep comparisons and explanations, laid out for reading instead of scrolling a chat transcript
  • Canvas for changing something, like a configuration, and watching it update as you talk
Wireframes of the three surfaces in blue-to-magenta outlines. Side Panel: 1:1 conversations and lightweight actions in context with the page. Full Screen: immersive learning, deep explanations and focused conversations. Generative Canvas: modifying, editing, customizing and updating data with continued guidance, such as product configuration.
Side panel, full screen and canvas

Scaling across Dell

With the foundations in place, I rebuilt every Virtual Assistant component in the new language. Around 15 teams now build on it, and I consult with each one, usually designing a component their product needs. Coming from Alienware, that scale was the biggest change for me.

Teams started using the language before it was ready and filled the gaps with the standard Dell Design System, which meant a lot of back and forth later. So I'm now working with DDS on a community library where teams share the components they've built. If I did this again, I'd set it up much earlier.

Toward AI Mode

The project started as AI Mode, a full-page experience built around each customer. Upgrading the Virtual Assistant got the language to customers sooner, and a lot of the groundwork for AI Mode is now in place.

A blurred early plan for AI Mode, a standalone full-page Dell AI experience: a large laptop render with configuration cards below and a conversation panel on the right.
Initial plans for AI Mode, a standalone experience. Blurred for confidentiality.