Design Systems for Brands, Not Just Products

Most organisations that invested in a design system built it for the product: components, tokens, states, documentation. Inside the application, consistency improved dramatically. Outside it, the brand still drifts — sales decks, event stands, packaging, recruitment ads and social templates each developing their own dialect.

Where the Fragmentation Comes From

Product design systems are built by and for engineers and product designers. The people producing a conference banner or a quarterly investor deck are usually neither, and the system offers them nothing usable. So they improvise from whatever file they can find, and the brand splinters at exactly the touchpoints with the widest external audience.

Tokens Above Components

The portable layer is not the component — a React button is meaningless to a print designer. It is the token: the colour value, the type scale, the spacing rhythm, the corner treatment, the motion curve.

Defined once and expressed in each medium's native format — CSS variables for web, Figma variables for design, swatch libraries for print, LUTs for video — tokens keep the brand coherent across media that share no tooling.

Document Intent, Not Just Specification

A specification says the accent colour is a particular hex value. Intent says the accent marks a single primary action and loses its meaning when repeated. The second survives contact with situations the system's authors never anticipated; the first does not.

Most brand guidelines document specification exhaustively and intent barely at all, which is why they stop being useful the moment someone faces a novel format.

Templates Are the Adoption Mechanism

Adoption follows convenience. If the on-brand deck template is genuinely easier than starting from a blank file, people will use it. If it is locked, fussy or missing the layouts people actually need, they will not, and no amount of policy will change that.

Build templates for the formats the organisation really produces — including the unglamorous ones like internal memos and job listings.

Govern Lightly

A system that requires approval for every asset becomes a bottleneck and gets routed around. Define a small set of non-negotiables — logo treatment, colour meaning, typographic hierarchy — and allow genuine latitude elsewhere. Systems that permit expression survive; systems that only forbid get abandoned.

The measure of a brand system is not how rigid it is. It is whether someone with no design training can produce something recognisably yours.