You've developed a powerful brand, with clear strategy, a detailed identity system, a pattern of behaviors, and amazing assets. Keeping that finely-tuned work of art running effectively and consistently with an ever-changing mix of suppliers and developers, internal teams and individual stakeholders, is your next challenge.
Lucky you! There's a rapidly expanding range of digital solutions (including useful AI tools) available to make your life easier and more productive.
Let's take a look.
Above: NASA brand guidelines. How we did it in the old days...
Many companies invest in online guidelines tools for a broad spectrum of users, from marketing teams who interact with the brand frequently, to those in HR or sales who might only need the logo on occasion. Online guidelines are instantly updatable, can be very user friendly, are easily communicated by circulating a link, and are great for users who just need a quick answer.
There are a few different options here:
(1) Purpose-built microsites
For close control and scalability, a microsite is often the answer larger organizations with strict security policies are drawn to. These can be nested and managed within the corporate domain, offer flexibility in design, and scale to support brand evolution indefinitely. They often require higher upfront investment in design and development, but lead to lower ongoing maintenance costs.
(2) Off the shelf services
Alternately, a team might opt for an off-the-shelf solution, which will typically allow for customization. Leading examples include Frontify, BrandFolder, and Lingo.
Above: Frontify. Good stuff if you want a packaged solution.
Frontify is currently at the top end of the market in off-the-shelf online brand guidelines solutions. They offer the most flexible premade online guidelines, with many premade content modules to select from. Frontify’s brand guidelines can integrate with a digital asset manager and a dynamic template tool. They also offer an AI Brand Assistant to help with answering questions.
BrandFolder’s brand guidelines offering, BrandGuide, is designed to supplement their larger digital asset management (DAM) solution. BrandFolder has a robust dynamic template solution, which can support both print and digital workflows.
Corebook's ability to host background images and animations provides for visually richer brand guidelines. It also has a helpful micro-navigation feature that allows linking to specific areas of each page.
Lastly, Lingo has a brand guidelines tool called Brand Style Guide which is also designed to work with their own digital asset management solution. Lingo’s tool features analytics and Figma integration, and a limited set of content blocks but enough to cover all the necessities.
Of course, an online brand guidelines approach is not ideal for all purposes and end-user needs. If you have strict security, like many of our clients, it may not be possible to create new logins for vendors in your brand center. Or you might have specialized brand information that isn’t for such a broad audience that it warrants creating a whole new section of online brand guidelines, but for which you still need documentation. These are all still use cases for hard copy guidelines.
Hard-copy guidelines (e.g, in PDF format) are sometimes assumed to be anachronistic, but for many they remain a necessity. They're a solution for organizations with strict network security, those that don't want to pay a monthly subscription for maintenance, rely on extended hardware specifications, or need portability for regions without cell coverage. They're easy to produce, can be addressed quickly by teams and searched. Content can be indexed and extracted by third party software for digitalization of the most important sections.
The obvious disadvantage is that a hard copy can't be automatically updated to the latest version the way a digital instance can when specs evolve. They may also be ignored or forgotten about in teams where no designated brand owner exists.
Specialized guidelines are a subset of brand guidelines focused on a specific topic for a specific audience, such as trademark guidelines or signage. These are usually delivered in PDF format because they're not of general enough relevance for them to warrant being posted online.
Extended brand guidelines contain the fundamental brand information, usually the same information as is posted in the online brand guidelines, with significantly more information for specialized groups.
Figma. Powerful, collaborative and efficient.
Supermoon typically builds visual identity assets and rules directly into the Figma ecosystem. After final approvals, we build out guidelines. Distributed digital collaboration is a key function of Figma, making it tailormade for both inhouse and remote teams that need to review progress and move to development quickly. It's a powerful tool in particular for digital product teams that iterate on design rapidly.
A Figma workflow helps designers document core visual identity elements like brand colors and typography and create variances for UI design system components, such as buttons and layouts. These can in turn be further iterated on through production, with developers having instant access to any further updates. Workflows in Figma integrated with other low or no-code development tools and Claude integrations are also commonplace. Building your brand guidelines directly into Figma can create other efficiencies by removing the need for separate UI guidelines documentation, since you can simply export frames and components to hard copy versions.
A key advantage of a semi-automated, controllable system like Figma is that if a designer revises an original parent component, all other component instances can be automatically updated. Everything stays up to date, reducing management overhead.
Recently, Dropbox had a design studio rebuild their brand brand guidelines using the Rive editor, and released them publicly. Rive is a design tool that makes it easier for designers to create animated interactive experiences using vector based graphics.
A Rive interface can be connected to a CMS for maintaining content, for example through a Webflow CMS project interface. It's clearly not for everyone, and probably best for high-level brand guidelines, but an interesting approach to keep track of.
You might assume the AI hyperscalers already have some way to solve for core brand creation and eventual curation and documentation.
There are some basic tools for documentation, like Figma's AI Brand Guidelines Generator for casual applications, but the reality is that for strong brands, the early phases of the process will demand human thought and craft at least for the foreseeable future. Particularly for organizations looking to position themselves uniquely and stick around for the longer term, and who recognize that their brand is a valuable asset in and of itself.
The reason is that powerful brands are driven from a strategic core that ultimately delivers not just visual differentiation, but experiential differentiation, authenticity, resonance, recollection, and consistency. Some of these are complex, subjective emotion-driven areas that AI is just not reliable at judging or safely ascertaining yet.
Documentation and extension of a system for marketing, UI, or product development are however examples of areas that assistive technologies could provide considerable value.
There have been a few research intiatives announced in previous years addressing documentation tasks such as Corebook AI, but as of the writing of this article, none that have come fully to market. Before spending precious time, drop us a note and we can walk you through the state of play.
Currently, software tools and platforms more frequently deal with a core strategic identity system once it's already created and approved by humans.
For example, Claude Design takes your approved brand assets and builds out digital design systems for websites and products. Powerful extension platforms like Obello or brand.ai's Brand Studio can help you safely generate new assets for marketing from the approved brand system. These leaders and various other GPT-driven products effectively work as automated brand guardians, helping new production assets remain on-brand across channels and variances.
Within brand world and digital channels, the landscape is ever changing. We're glad to help you assess your brand management needs and recommend an effective solution for you.
Feel free to reach out!
