How do you create a brand that’s consistent and easy to use, even as your company grows? That’s the goal of creating a scalable brand.
A scalable brand gives every member of your team the tools they need to create exceptional work. Check out the video below to learn more about what a scalable brand is, why it matters, and how you can build one for your team.
A scalable brand is a set of design assets and guidelines that make content creation less of a headache. Templates, patterns, photo libraries, icon libraries — these are all potential pieces of a scalable brand. At Lemonly, we call this a design system.
Design system: The set of assets and guidelines you use to make consistent, on-brand content at scale
Having these assets and guidelines handy makes it easier to ensure your content is clear, consistent, and effective across a wide range of applications and use cases. That’s especially important (and difficult) when multiple team members are responsible for creating content.
You need a brand that can grow, because ideally, your company will grow. Companies evolve with new campaigns, new products or services, new platforms, and even new team members. Your brand needs to be able to adapt to those changes without losing its essence. Your brand should still feel like you.
Consistency builds trust. When your brand looks, feels, and sounds the same across every touchpoint, it reinforces credibility. If some of your posts look polished and branded while others are full of WordArt and watermarked stock photos, your audience is less likely to take you seriously. Without scalable systems and guidelines, your brand gets fragmented. It erodes trust and makes your team less efficient.
Scalable brand assets save you time and money. They reduce design bottlenecks, empower non-design teams to create on-brand content, and help ensure no one is reinventing the wheel. Or inventing a worse, less effective wheel. Your team can move quickly and still put out things that look good and build brand equity.
Another benefit of a scalable brand is its future-proofing capabilities. If you’re launching a new product, expanding services, beefing up your employer branding, or whatever the next exciting thing is — a scalable brand ensures you already have what you need to create content to support the next stage of your organization.
An effective scalable brand provides both guidance and flexibility through a strong foundation, clear voice and tone, visual elements, and established ground rules.
Your brand foundation includes the key elements that define who you are. Maybe they’re your mission, vision, and values, or perhaps you call them your mantra and brand promise. No matter how you refer to them, the elements of your brand foundation should be reflected in all the brand pieces that follow. It’s how you practice what you preach, and it helps build trust in your brand.
The next building block is your voice and tone. Voice is your brand’s personality. It should stay constant across all your written communications, but the tone, or the overall feeling and emotional quality of your message, should adjust to suit the purpose of your communication. For example, Lemonly’s voice is fun and friendly, but we can deliver a message with a more serious tone while still maintaining that brand voice. That’s the flexibility that helps your brand scale while staying consistent.
Looking to create or refine your brand foundation, voice and tone, or key messages? A messaging guide is your best friend. It's a centralized place for your brand's messaging strategy, from high-level positioning to practical applications.
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Visual elements help strengthen your brand story. Logo, colors, typefaces, icons, brand patterns — even things like photography and illustration. Establishing and properly using these visual elements helps legitimize your brand and build your credibility.
Here's a sample of visual elements from Lemonly's own brand, including colors, fonts, illustration style, and more.
Animated and interactive elements can also be part of your larger brand presence. Is your brand bouncy? Does it “zoom”? Is your motion style more playful or sleek? Elements like the transitions you use in videos or the walking patterns of your animated characters provide your audience with clues about your personality and contribute to the overall cohesiveness of your brand.
When you have all the elements above defined, people also need to know how to use them the right way. That’s why you want to include both rules and flexibility. A great brand system isn’t rigid; it’s structured but leaves room for creative interpretation. It adapts without breaking.
An icon library helps establish a shared visual lanaguage for your brand. Represent key concepts, product features, or aspects of your business with quick visual shorthand. Check out five benefits of creating an icon library that makes your visual identity easy to implement at scale.
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The goal of a scalable brand is to build a design system that creates repeatable design solutions. That way, your brand doesn’t have to rely on one designer’s memory or one-off creative files. To meet that goal, you have to tokenize your design. Think like a developer. You want to create reusable elements (such as button styles, header images, or typography stylings) that can be applied consistently across multiple areas.
Let’s break it down into six key steps.
Before you start creating new things, audit what you already have. Look for the building blocks your team is using across different applications. Logos, colors, typefaces, character designs, photos — that kind of stuff. As you audit, ask yourself these questions:
Your brand elements should reinforce and express your brand foundation, so as you do your audit, check back to make sure everything feels cohesive with your larger brand presence.
Ready to audit your own brand assets? Check out our brand audit template to help you get started.
If you want a pattern, create one. If you’re missing some icons that would be useful, get them designed. If you need to establish clearer heading styles, do that. This process might take a while, but with the results of your audit, you can prioritize where to start and make adjustments as you go.
As you build your scalable brand, create clear, easy-to-follow rules for your assets. How big should icons be in print? Which logo color belongs on a dark background versus on a light background? How should your team select photos from your photo library? The clearer you are on your guidelines, the easier it will be for your team members to create on-brand content with confidence.
You get bonus points for making your brand standards a living doc for easier updates. That way, people aren’t still referring to an old version of the guidelines they saved to their desktop as a PDF. We recommend housing your guidelines and rules on Figma or another digital asset manager.
Once you have defined and shared your rules, you can unleash the power of templates. Your team will love ‘em. Design systems should include ready-to-use social templates, ad layouts, presentation decks, and email headers. Here are some of ours.
Just swap out the text, make sure you’re following the guidelines for spacing and such, and you’re good to go. Tools like Figma Buzz can make using branded templates a snap.
Next, just like you need to house your guidelines somewhere everyone can access, you also need to centralize your brand kit — that includes your logo files, color palettes, typography styles, elements, and your beautiful, beloved branded templates.
Where are these things being stored? How are people finding them? Can the right people access them when needed?
At Lemonly, we use Dropbox, but we also have an Adobe library for shared brand elements and a Canva account with a brand kit that the non-designers truly appreciate.
Once you have your assets, guidelines, templates, and organizational tools, you have a few more ongoing tasks.
First, test for flexibility: Can your design system work for different teams and platforms? Is it easy to use? Does it break with custom content or varying use cases? Sometimes your brand gets to break the rules. What use cases call for custom content? You probably want to call those out in your documentation somewhere, or create a process where the brand team can grant exceptions to the rules. That’s always a fun power to have, isn’t it?
In addition to testing for flexibility as you go, you want to iterate over time. Just because your design system can scale doesn’t mean it’s going to stay the same forever. New brand needs come up. Things might need a refresh after a while.
For your scalable brand to be valuable for your organization, every team — from creative to marketing to HR — needs the right tools to create on-brand work.
There are a variety of tools to explore for executing your beautiful, scalable brand. Here are some favorites we’ve used at Lemonly:
Non-designers are big fans of Canva. It’s great for marketing teams who need on-brand graphics fast. You can upload your brand assets, your templates, your colors, and whip something up in a few seconds. Check it out.
Sales teams love these. When you have pre-built, templated presentation decks with locked layouts and brand colors, you can customize to fit anything from a pitch deck to a presentation for potential interns.
We have a pretty comprehensive master slide deck at Lemonly, which we love. Anybody can make a copy, delete the slides they don’t want, fill in their own information, and roll with it.
Adobe houses our centralized color palettes, graphics, and templates for designers. It’s perfect for creating bespoke content that still follows the brand. Plus, it’s easy to add newly created icons and illustrations to your library for reusing next time.
Tools like Brandfolder or Adobe Experience Manager ensure everyone pulls the same high-quality, pre-approved brand assets. These are enterprise-level tools that include metadata for photo sourcing and robust tagging and search capabilities. If you want a photo of someone laughing at a desk, you can find that pretty quickly — as long as it’s tagged. (You should also maintain good tagging practices, by the way.)
There are lots of tools out there, and new design tools are cropping up all the time. The best tool for you will depend on your team’s skills, needs, and existing toolset. Once you’ve established the building blocks for a scalable brand, you can implement your design system across one or multiple tools that suit your needs.
The last and most important thing to remember about a scalable brand: It’s only as good as the team that uses it.
You have to give your people the training and onboarding they need to be successful using your brand. Run brand workshops, create quick video walkthroughs, and provide answers to FAQs. An effective design system benefits everyone on the team. Make sure they know how to make the most of it.
When your brand can scale, your message becomes more powerful, and your team can focus on what matters most: connecting with your audience.
Looking for a partner to help build a design system and brand that seriously scales? Let’s get in touch. And in the meantime, don’t forget to subscribe to the Lemonly Lowdown and YouTube channel.
