A brand book is no longer enough. In the digital age, what your brand really needs is a Design System

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For brands that are creating products across multiple 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.
Digital is the new home for our brands – it’s a no brainer. But transitioning your presence consistently across different digital platforms is not always a smooth process. For brands that are creating products across multiple 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 in relation to the brand is certainly one of the new challenges of brand presence , brought about by the now more intense presence in digital environments. In this sense, this same experience must be consistent, so that users can recognize the brand through visual identification, even when the logo is not visible.

If you think about brands like Coca-Cola or Apple, you will realize that you would easily recognize an advertisement, 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 our accurate mobile phone number list brand's communication across different physical media – whether in an advertisement, a presentation or a report – the transition of our brands to the digital environment requires equal or greater consistency in their presence across different platforms; Whether on a computer screen, cell phone or smartwatch, we want our brand presentation to be consistent across all channels.

Maintaining this consistency in online environments is increasingly important for the brand to be recognized through user interaction. This is why it is so important for brands to create their design system while they are in the process of building digital products across multiple platforms.

It is in the design of the dynamics of interaction with users that the digital platforms of modern brands must stand out and express themselves in the customization of the experience, never putting the user's expectations in relation to functionality at risk.
Many of the usability conventions that make a digital experience intuitive are universal and are defined by big technology companies 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 components, the brand should seek to leave its mark on styles (color, typography, etc.), tone of voice, micro-animations and, at certain times, on the digital product itself, such as transition or success screens, for example. An example of these interaction dynamics could be, for example, the heart that appears when we double tap on an Instagram post, which is nothing more than a success message regarding the request made to the server.

By defining this 'skeleton' through a design system, it makes the design and production of brands' online presence on different platforms more efficient, accelerating the design and development process.

It is also the design system that guides the team in the taxonomy and, if possible, in the principles of digital product experience, so that both the business, marketers, designers and engineers can use the same vocabulary to refer to the different elements that make up the brand's presence in the digital environment and there is a consistent experience across the various channels.