+1
I couldn’t have said it better (except for the the error in red 
)
woops, typing too fast, fixed it. Good catch.
If the purpose of design guidelines is control, then no-way is a text document enough.
If the purpose is inspiration, then maybe, but then I’d choose imagery, not words.
I think you want a bit of both.
Yo, what you describe is a little like the foundation of the pyramid on the Ziba document. And under the best circumstance with the best teams, I do think that should be enough, but add a few licensees and a few consultants in the mix, all with their own interpretations and you may wish it was locked down a little tighter. In an ideal scenario, I’m with you, but in my experiences it is seldom the case and more definition is often needed to make the document effective.
Design is inherently visual, therefore any documents we make should have a substantial visual element. mho.
Yo, you might be right about the text, though I have not used a text only document before. As noted, whether the VBL document is intended for inspiration or control, drives the content. It is usually easier to pick up a product and explain than to send out a visual guide. The documents are useful as material, texture, and color spec reference. I find that they are used once for visual reference and then discarded. What would make it more sticky?
Can anyone provide current examples of ID guidelines? It looks like the links are outdated now.
Thanks!
Bumping this too, as the first designer at my company (much like the original poster) some examples of a vbl document would be awesome to look through.
this video came out a bit ago and got me really thinking about how a clearly defined vbl would help where I work, but I’m still missing an actual example of one.
Just needed to google a bit, they’re still around there. Ziba’s example can be found at Ziba’s website. The other one in slideshare.net
It’s interesting to see this pop up again as I’m currently knee deep in working on this for MillerCoors.
Would you be willing to expand a bit on what kind of format you are going with? and perhaps what the contents (key things to have) are?
For me the key things I include are:
- Brand Persona (who it the aspirational tip of the spear in terms of users)
- Average brand user (mass adoption)
- Brand Value Prop (why does the brand exist, what does it do best)
- Visual Examples, word associations, related objects (for example for Polk I used a 70’s Challenger, a vintage pair of redwings, a pair of tortoise shell ray bans, and an Eames lounger)
- Brand Pillars (Usually three things that all products have to have in the language, for example for Polk the three pillars I used are Crafted, Heritage, Trasnpotive, with explanations of each and a visual for each)
- Brand ingredients (visual examples of details like controls, text, intersection, from example in the world that fit the language)
- Form (visual examples of acceptable overall forms)
- Materials (materials allowed in the language)
- Color pallets
- reference designs (concept examples of the language manifest in product, packaging, web expressions, lit, apps, whatever is needed, I try to show as many examples as possible down to comps of billboards)
this discussion has focused on consumer products, having had done one for a B to B and another coming up, I’d be interested in seeing how this narrows the focus.
Initially, I’d argue the business audience is much less savy or interested in the branding or end user side of the equation.
Another thing that makes it a little more difficult is when instead of having a niche in a market, trying to target a broad spectrum middle of the road. My company seems to not have interest in competing in the high end of our b2b market, but we’re certainly not low end, the only thing is each year the low end gets better and better. To complicate things further, sometimes the people purchasing our product are not the people picking it out. 
To be honest, I kind of wish we had the ability to break the offering into separate brands targeted at certain niche markets that would give us a wide spread of demographics in the market, it would make thinking about things like a vbl a little easier and more targeted.
Bump Bump for another person working on one!
Always looking for examples - I will post any should I find some.
I’m on board with Yo’s criteria, especially defining the persona.
Those that HAVE created them in the past, did you find them to be useful on the product design side of things?
Definitely useful both for guiding the design team and for eliminating HiPPO syndrome (Highest Paid Person’s Opinion) where someone just says “I like this, I don’t like that”. It really helps in minimizing personal preference and aligning on a strategy vs one person’s personal preference.
The key to having one of these is using it and enforcing it.
10 years later, another designer (me) looking for inspiration in making this for a business. Thanks for your input Ditullo! You have been a great influence in my design career.
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Mega-old thread but always a relevant topic and definitely know the struggle of there not being enough real-world references out there. Hope someone finds it useful. This is our old design guideline doc we put together in 2020 when I built an internal floating ID team to serve our larger product team. Needed a way to get what used to live largely in my head out on paper so other folks could pick up the thread and help spread the workload.
Overall this looks fairly cringey to me after 4 more years of design leadership experience haha. Some pretty hot takes in here on our design ethos which at the time was very relevant as we had just doubled the team size, were in Covid chaos, and were pretty fearful of losing our special design sauce. Some of that holds up and some doesn’t. We referenced this doc occasionally as there were some juicy bits we kept coming back to and used them as decision-makers. Definitely wasn’t something we or the rest of the company looked at regularly. It helped convince folks that the new team was worthy of being a part of larger strategy conversations and had a strong vision for our future. It was suggested reading for new hires across the company just so they got a feel for what made our products and processes unique. I’d say that the act of building this doc was actually more useful than the doc itself. It forced a new team to unite around a common vision. Some new folks on the team now so taking the opportunity to collaborate with them on a V2. I suspect a good amount of what’s in here will be dropped and generally simplified.
Quick shout to @_YO for some inspo on this project from a design presentation of his I saw in like 2018.
Design Language System 210615.pdf (41.0 MB)
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I just skimmed it but I love it!
Very comprehensive and cohesive. I’m not super familiar with the pd brand but all the pages and examples seemed obvious in a good way. The design language breakdown is more than just stuff on paper and something I could see in application.
I’m going to give this a deeper read. I’m actually working on some similar design DNA projects for clients so timely that you shared this.
Thanks!
Great job.
R
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@artviger, most of all I appreciate your takeaways:
- “get what used to live in my head”
- “spread the workload”
- “some juicy bits, the rest is occasional”
- tool for onboarding
- the act of making it being useful in itself
I’ve used ours for onboarding and as a hazy rubric for design ideation, sometimes for directing the right way to do a feature or detail. One ask which I’ve mostly ignored is making the document robust enough to be sent to an overseas manufacturer who throws ID and engineering in for free, so that we can “scale”.
Here’s a page from our basic doc. We eventually made it into a standalone website.
