Brand Engine

Design Systems

Operationalize your brand identity with a cohesive language transforms the way you build, design and develop.

What is a Design System?

A design system is the collection of an organization’s visual elements, governed by usage guidelines, brand identity, style guides and more, all organized and stored together to drive cohesive, on-brand design and consistent user experiences. 

The Result: A cohesive and consistent representation of your brand that your customers and your team can articulate and put into practice.

Your brand is the foundational currency of your company. Effective communication, whether it’s visual or written, needs to be intentional. As your business scales, there is more and more room for unintentional variations in your message. 

Why Implement a Design System?

Other great reasons why organizations need a design system include: Inconsistent visual branding, disjointed user experiences, redundant creative work, lost or scattered assets, wasted time or efforts, digital experiences that lack focus, and more. 

But most of all: a design system is the key to creating a united visual front and operationalizing your brand’s visual identity. 

Design systems integrate brand positioning, brand strategy and logic into the visual aspects of your branding, for improved scalability, velocity, and growth.

A robust design system may include:

  • Design usage guidelines
  • Visual and functional design element libraries
  • UX framework
  • Brand story

How your design system ultimately looks and operates will be as unique as your brand itself, built for how you’ll use it.

What are the benefits of a design system or language? 

Creating an in-depth design system or design language is a large project with many benefits, such as:

  • Improving the user experiences with visual, emotional and functional consistency across platforms, tools, content, etc. 
  • Communicating the why and how of your brand design, from overarching philosophies to the important reasons behind the smallest design details
  • Aligning internal teams around design for faster deployment of company assets
  • Defining parameters for less confusion and more action
  • Establishing consistent branded communication 

The continuity of your brand is directly related to the negative friction that your customers feel as the engage with you throughout their lifecycle.

Our Approach to Your Design Systems

To create a common language that unites all of your brand communications, we start by taking a deep look into your company objectives and tie similar strategies into any of our other branding services. 

We define your design system by developing a comprehensive understanding of your brand, your customers and your organizational structure. Not only are we focused on the creative side of your design, we are also focused on how your team will use design elements and how your customers will react to them.

Creating your design system is a collaborative effort. Our team works with executives and subject matter experts from across your organization to understand every piece of the puzzle.

Your design system will include every applicable user experience, design and brand element that your teams need to use, organized in a centralized location, ideally, a living, breathing web page. To guide the use of these elements and visual brand consistency, we’ll help you to create the usage guidelines, methodologies, style guides, frameworks and any other brand elements that are needed for your comprehensive design system. Once complete, we’ll provide any hands-on help you need to leverage this new visual strategy to grow your business. 

Contact the Impulse Creative team to learn more about how design systems can help your overall brand alignment.