Making Design Decisions: Brand Guide or Design System?

1. Step back and understand your own need

While there are a handful of similarities and many more tactical differences between a brand guide and a design system, the core differentiator is why you go to each. You go to a brand guide as the resource for ensuring that you’re maintaining visual and verbal consistency (often in marketing): am I using the right colors and fonts or is the language I’m using appropriate for our audience? On the other hand, you go to a design system to reference your catalog of digital design decisions (better suited for products or digital experiences): which components are used where in our product, or when should I use one design pattern over another?

2. Evaluate if your existing resources meet your need

Another difference between the two is that brand guides are often more static, when they’re created (usually around the time the brand is created or during a rebranding phase) they are generally very thorough and meant to be a guidepost for future decisions to maintain brand consistency. On the other hand, design systems are much more iterative. A design system may start small, and evolve as the product does or as new needs are identified.

If the solution to the problem you’re trying to solve lives in your brand guide, great! If it doesn’t, or if you’re brand guide feels too limiting, or your existing design system too small, that’s a key signal that you may have exhausted your available resources. It may be time to think about building or expanding.

3. Recognize when it’s time to build or expand a design system

If you have a starter design system, but you’ve recognized it’s at its limits, that means you’re probably ready to expand and add. When adding to your design system, it’s critical to make sure you’re documenting additions thoroughly to set you and your team up for success. A design system that isn’t organized and lacks documentation is not only difficult to use, but also runs the risk of housing redundancies and other general bloat, which can introduce a whole host of problems for your product. If you’re at the stage where you have multiple products and your design system is already quite large, it could be time to audit and see where it can be consolidated before adding more.

On the flip side, if you’re building your first product or creating your brand's first digital experience and you’re going to your company’s brand guide for all of your design decisions, it may be time to look into starting a design system. Digital experiences tend to cover a lot of ground that isn’t always accounted for in a typical brand guide. Factors like digital accessibility, interactions, animations, and more are areas that need to be considered in your digital experience, so if you’re lacking any guidelines in these areas, it’s a pretty clear indicator you should be investing in building a design system.