In the digital age, the brand book is no longer enough. Your brand needs a Design System.
Digital is the new home of our brands – it’s a no-brainer. But the transition of your presence, consistently, across different digital platforms, is not always a peaceful process. For brands that are creating products on various channels (web, app, and others) it is essential to create a brand design system – the bible of their presence, behavior, and interaction with users, on online platforms.
The user experience concerning the brand is certainly one of the new challenges of the presence of brands, contributed by the now more intense presence in digital environments. In that sense, that same experience must be consistent, so that users can recognize the brand through visual identification, even when the logo is not in sight. If you think of brands like Coca-Cola or Apple, you will notice that you would easily recognize an ad, for example, even if the logo was not present – this happens when the brand guidelines, defined in the brand book, are well followed.
If the brand book is essential to create coherence in the communication of our brand on the various physical supports – be it in an advertisement, in a presentation, or a report -, the transition of our brands to the digital environment requires equal or greater consistency of their presence on the different platforms; whether on the computer screen, mobile phone or smartwatch, we want our brand presentation to be consistent across all channels. Maintaining this coherence in online environments is increasingly important for the brand to be recognized also for its interaction with the user. That is why it is so important that brands create their design system, while they are in the process of building digital products, on various platforms.
It is in the design of the interaction dynamics with users that the digital platforms of modern brands should stand out and express themselves in the customization of the experience, never jeopardizing the user’s expectation regarding functionality.
Many of the usability conventions that make a digital experience intuitive are universal and are defined by major technologies such as Google, Apple, or Facebook – not respecting these standards that are recognized by the user can imply a greater learning curve and even generate frustration.
Instead of innovating in the components, the brand should try to leave its stamp on the styles (color, typography, etc.), tone of voice, micro-animations, and, in certain moments, on the digital product itself, such as transition or success screens, for example. An example of these interaction dynamics can be, for example, the heart that appears when we double-tap on an Instagram post that is nothing more than a message of success in the face of the request made to the server.
By defining this ‘skeleton’ through a design system, makes the design and production of brands’ online presence on different platforms more efficient, speeding up the design and development process. It is also the design system that guides the team in taxonomy and, if possible, in the principles of digital product experience, so that both the business, as well as marketers, designers, and engineers, can use the same vocabulary to refer to the different elements that compose it. the presence of the brand in the digital environment and there is a consistent experience across the various channels.
In a simplified way, these are the elements that must compose a design system:
Whether to create consistency in the presentation of the brand to the user, to give more freedom in the creation of differentiating interactions, or to have more agile teams in the construction of their digital products, the design system is a powerful ally for the digital presence of any brand.
Although the construction process is not linear or fast, it is important to define the rules by which the brand is guided, doing its best not to increase the technical and UX / UI debt (execution of components or interactions that will need to be corrected later, due to the need to produce quickly) of digital products.
As Nick Myers, Director of Product Design at Facebook, says, “Our visual interface is now our brand”. So, I leave you a challenge. Open your website or app and answer: does this space represent my brand well?
Written by António Cancela de Abreu, Strategic Design lead, and Diogo Gonçalves da Cunha, CTO at Bliss Applications.
Originally published at Marketeer
