Design Systems: The Secret to Getting Your Brand Un-Stuck

Most brands today engage their audiences primarily, if not almost exclusively, through digital media. Digital moves fast, though, and so curating a big brand online is inherently difficult - it can get unwieldy over time, and websafe fonts and colors alone aren’t enough to keep an experience on the rails. 

When this happens, you may feel like your brand has become stuck. 
 

Symptoms of a “stuck” brand can include: 

• You find that new pages, app flows, or experiences take a long time to mock, prototype, review, and align on across teams
• You feel like your brand is getting out of control, inconsistent, or less exciting
• You experience component creep, leading to an overgrown component library and inconsistent page layouts across your website
• Your brand’s color palette isn’t being used to its full potential
• The handoff process from designers to developers is tedious and full of misinterpretations
• Despite an overall responsive website, new design elements and colors struggle to meet the same standards as your existing digital identity
• Spinning up microsites for campaigns or events feels like starting from scratch each time
   

If you and your brand are suffering from these digital afflictions, what’s the cure?

Well, this is where a modern design system can help. 

Modern design systems prioritize flexibility and scalability while maintaining consistency. They emphasize reusable components, clear documentation, and accessibility for all users.  

You may already have a “design system” in place inasmuch as you have an established set of brand standards, a component library, and a set of page templates. But what we’re talking about is actually much more vertically integrated than that.
 

What makes a best in class design system?

A digital design system is a comprehensive collection of reusable components, guidelines, and patterns that define the look, feel, and functionality of a digital experience. It ensures consistency, efficiency and scalability in the design and development process. 

Moreover, libraries of documented, reusable components allow teams to quickly ideate new solutions at scale.

Global elements like icons or a button, common button groups, or an entire component; whether it’s for mobile or desktop, static or interactive; they can all be consistently applied to it from the start. 

What makes this possible is the ability to have a wide array of colors, tints, shades, text styles, corner bevels, shadows, lockups, responsive rules, and more loaded into the design platform’s library. Tools like Figma make it quick and seamless to build these libraries, prototype and preview with others, and templatize for anyone in the organization to use. 
 

The secret ingredient that helps brands get unstuck: parallel-pathing design & development.

Speaking of prototyping, that brings us to the final way design systems are a sort of singularity that help brands break through: they truly close the gap between design and development. 

Baked into design systems (like the ones we create for our clients in Figma) are the ability to: 

1. Quickly prototype, preview, and share immersive experiences with developers and clients for feedback and testing… and with no coding needed, either! 
   
   For Phillips Academy at Andover, we used a prototype to bring clarity and alignment to what we wanted to build and were able to truly co-create a shared vision between clients, design, and dev at every step of the way.
    
2. Document and “bake in” annotations and specs for elements and components for developers to refer to post-handoff, minimizing misinterpretations. 
   
   We’re currently working with a global medical device supplier on this “dream state” and for a big brand, this kind of knowledge transfer and standardization from design to dev is a game-changer.
    
3. Create new variations of elements, and update existing ones globally, to keep up with additions to or changes in (respectively) a brand’s product portfolio. 
   
   For one of our pharma clients, an audit of their component library and brand elements helped us reconfigure everything into an efficient design system. This greatly reduced component variations and brand degradation, while improving accessibility and flexibility of their design patterns.
    
4. Finally, we can review design elements for an entire website or experience with clients within a single platform, making it effortless to “zoom in and out” to see the exact effects of individual design decisions on all affected elements instantly and simultaneously before implementing changes. 
   
   For a household beauty brand we worked with last year, we helped them sift through a rainbow of colors and gradients and decide how they wanted to bring them into a responsive and accessible design system through this exact process.

Does your brand feel stuck? Reach out to us to talk with Doug today about how a design system can help get you moving again!