Brand is the Design System
Reimagine the Future of Brand Data
Why Brand Identity Matters More Than Ever
People are overstimulated, feeds are flooded, and the pace content is accelerating. According to many research institutes, about 70% of social media content is now AI-generated. So if the floor has been raised and everyone can produce content, what truly matters in this new world?
Simple answer, it’s your brand. There’s much creative debate on the definition of a brand but we resonate with some combination of… “the visual identity and soul behind your business”. It’s what makes people choose Coca-Cola over Pepsi. It’s the guide for how to think and reason about any form of content Ultimately brands create an emotional bond between your business, your employees, and the people you serve.
We believe that all brands are experiencing a content paradox.
On one hand, the demand for content has become exponential. The expectation of your creative teams is growing and it’s a heavy weight to carry. Whether it’s in marketing to produce more social and email content or design teams to produce websites, renders, and apps
On the other hand, the systems meant to produce consistent content haven’t evolved. AI tools and non-creative teams can exacerbate this problem. Models and agentic tools can either help or hurt or help content production process. Based on our research and experience, the best brand teams have three elements that set them apart in their respective industry; strong identity, culture of creativity, and incredible brand data foundations.
What is Brand Data?
Brand data is more complex than most people realize. It manifests itself across a spectrum from static to dynamic elements. Within this spectrum, each asset type has its own respective life cycle with dozens of data types to manage and maintain. See our breakdown below…
There are many ways to visualize a brand data ecosystem but we like to think of it as five different areas with their own respective data types and forms.
Assets: We see two layers here, core brand identity assets and reusable digital assets. They differ in terms of their usage and application. The core brand identity (logos, colors, typography, icons, and illustrations) is used everywhere, many times a day, by many teams. Reusable digital assets like Figma files, photography, and videos are used at a point in time for a piece of content.
Guidelines: Brand guidelines and usage rules are typically standard here but depending on your industry, you might have more detailed guidance around art direction or UI libraries. These need to be followed strictly by teams in order to scale brand content.
Artifacts: The strategy and operations of any brand content and marketing team always exist in some form of visual artifact. Typically these are documents but can also be presentations or Figma files or even code. They describe direction and definition for teams to execute on.
Solutions: Every business sells a product or service to make money. These exist because they solve a problem. All teams need to understand the fundamental unit of sale in order to be effective visual storytellers and marketers.
Voice: This is the most subjective layer and something that changes quite often with changes in strategy, product lines, and marketing campaigns. While voice and tone can be described, it’s hard for agents to follow and is typically tribal knowledge contained within a few people or decision makers in an organization.
Visual Perspective on the Past and Future
In the visual below you can see how we feel about the brand systems of the future. We believe across industries there are three core cross-industry areas that need to rethink how they use brand. Rather than defining them by a role or an organization, there are three main areas of business operations:
- Market - teams responsible for strategy, sales, and ops
- Design - creatives responsible for the touch points
- Develop - builders of the infrastructure and delivery mechanics
In the past and still to this day, a brand exists as decoupled assets across multiple tools, favoring certain relationships between these orgs. Depending on the industry these assets might have more emphasis based on the core product or service that drives revenue.
In the future, we imagine a living system. Not necessarily a place where all of the design work is done, but where all of the brand context is stored and managed. A solution that adapts to the needs of teams and identifies gaps depending on your industry and use cases.
Our belief is that when it comes to brand content execution, the creativity and ingenuity of the human species is unmatched. However when it comes to brand data management, recent model improvements and agentic capabilities open up a new form of headless design system infrastructure. Companies that invest in this infrastructure now will compound that advantage over time. The ones that don’t will simply lose a competitive edge in the near-term and suffer creatively in the long term.
What is a Design System?
Everyone has a different definition of a design system, but if you ask anyone in the tech industry, they would probably show you a UX/UI library Figma file, which is quite honestly only one form of a design system. While this form has much more depth than a static PDF, the definition of a design system is much more broad...
“A design system is a set of building blocks and standards that help keep the look and feel of products and experiences consistent. Think of it as a blueprint, offering a unified language and structured framework that guides teams through the complex process of creating digital products.”
— Chad Bergman, Designer Advocate at Figma
All design systems are meant to help creatives produce content. No matter what type of designer you are, all of us operate within some form of ontology. By this we mean That each of us has our own systems and relationships with the brand and the output.
Art directors have a relationship human culture, brand identity, and physical productions. Marketers have tools to help them build social media content and email marketing campaigns. Product designers use UX/UI libraries to produce digital experiences. The relationship between all of these creatives comes down to this: they operate within a brand. We don’t believe that there’s a design system today that serves the brand across all of the creative teams under one organization.
The Future Brand Design System
We believe brand data needs to be connected and dynamic.
This vision is simple but has a much deeper meaning. ‘Connected’ doesn’t just mean that it’s stored in one place, but that all of the appropriate metadata and embeddings are centralized. ‘Dynamic’ not only applies to its relationship to each other but also to how you manage that over time as it changes when your brand pivots or consumers react semantically.
We fundamentally believe that humans will own creativity and execution in marketing and design functions. Recent model improvements and agent capabilities don’t change that. The reality is, outside of the models, one of the most important things in practical brand application is context. If you’re a creative leader ask yourself…
- Where do my teams get brand data?
- How can I optimize for agents?
- Why do we have friction?
The Key Types of Brand Content
Every piece of brand content falls into what we like to call The Three C’s: Copy, Code, and Creative.
Copy is voice: messaging, tone, personality, the words that make your brand feel like your brand. How do you ensure AI-generated copy sounds like you and not like everyone else?
Code is how your brand shows up in products, websites, and applications. How do you prepare your design tokens, component libraries, and technical documentation for a world where AI agents are writing and shipping code?
Creative is the visual identity: campaigns, social content, photography, motion, illustration. How do you maintain art direction when AI is generating assets at a pace no human team can review?
Over the next few weeks we’re going to break down our thoughts and strategy on brand context across these different forms of content. Stay tuned.
Thanks for reading :)
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