Without a centralized and socialized set of principles and guidelines, the brand experience at U.S. News was being pulled in multiple directions. It was difficult for my team to reinforce guidelines when there was no artifact that everyone agreed to align with. Since this was a struggle that the Marketing team shared, I pitched creating new brand guidelines for U.S. News & World Report to that team’s lead.
Design Systems, Figma, Branding
U.S. News Brand Guidelines
Results
Solutions
Many of these issues could be addressed with an encompassing branding guideline and internal communication plan. I began this effort when some other timelines aligned.
When a new Marketing lead started, I broached the subject and they agreed that it was an effort worth starting. I then needed to gain the CTO’s agreement that this was a project worth spending some of the team’s resources on as a cross-functional effort.
Since there was some existing documentation I collected everything I was aware of and pulled out any guidelines that were still relevant.
I began biweekly meetings with the Marketing lead and a design team member recruited for having experience in branding work. We used this opportunity to identify brand guidelines from other organizations we could reference to build a framework. Additionally we decided that one of the organization’s quarterly meetings was a great place to debut the guidelines.
The design team member and I drafted an outline and began writing the new guidelines using a combination of the older material I had collected, information about the design system I managed, and brand identity pieces like the organization’s vision and mission statement.
I began engaging other teams that had a stake in the brand guidelines, like the photo editor, videographer and lifecycle marketing teams to review existing material and get their feedback on how we could further expand the guidelines to cover common issues they saw, like photography that did not match our tone.
Guidelines for what badge designs to use for certain levels of prestige were a missing piece. For instance, you could not give a dishwasher the same accolade as a large hospital. I workshopped this direction with the Design Director and rolled it into the overall Guidelines.
While writing the copy, we had been engaging with the legal team to assure they were in the loop. When the copy was ready, we sent it to them for a review.
I had tried building some batch badge creation workflows in Figma, since so many designers were fluent in using it, but there were a number of issues around Figma’s fairly weak custom vector tools and its lack of CMYK support. Badges needed to be available for web advertising as well as print applications like out-of-home and magazines, so these technical hurdles needed to be overcome. Illustrator’s batching tools were inconsistent, so I invested time in using Affinity for this process. It allowed for some layout control that would scale elements of the design for more or less typography and allow for all of the batch and exporting options required. I created a template series for the badges so new badges could be started fresh with consistent sizing.
With the copy complete, it was time for layout. Since so few members of the team were familiar with InDesign and print reproduction wasn’t as important, I decided to use Figma as the main layout tool. This way we could retain better version control and the whole team can contribute if needed. I laid out the guidelines by creating custom components for headlines, body copy and different visual-aid layouts. I also built out a suite of design tokens that would change the layout to allow the same page assets to be used for both digital presentations and printable versions of the guidelines.
In addition to the layout, I designed a number of components to illustrate different design motif options in the guidelines, as well as comparative designs to show best practices and sub-optimal implementations of messaging, branded assets, photos or illustrations.
Challenges
Consistency and alignment across an organization are incredibly important for a brand experience. While branding direction can be communicated in a number of ways, it’s important to have a shared artifact that everyone in an organization can refer to for aesthetic and messaging direction. Without this the branding for U.S. News was often pulled in different directions between different parts of the organization. I strongly believed new brand guidelines would help create more cohesion, and could help address other challenges at the organization:
Ownership of branding efforts was nebulous so it was difficult to get consensus on updating or creating new branding documentation.
Brand look and feel was fragmented and inconsistent as design work was democratised into teams through freelancers and tools like Canva and Generative AI. This work was often not sent to the design team for feedback or review. Even within the design team there was some misalignment.
Branded messaging terminology and tone were inconsistent and content was being written with a wide variety of voices. The quality of this material was taking a hit.
Licensed badges are an important part of U.S. News’ branding and an important revenue stream, but were difficult to create en-masse and were prone to quality and formatting issues.
Badges did not have consistent rules around the display of different pieces of information, such as the organization or person winning the award, or their location. Which badge type being used for what type of accolade were also inconsistent, a liability for more prestigious badges.
Within U.S. News, there was not alot of pride or buzz around the brand, so there was a missed opportunity to increase morale.
The existing brand documents were hidden in random shared drives and not socialized to the rest of the organization. Additionally they were nearly a decade out of date. Since few designers on the team had print layout experience, the InDesign files for these previous designs were not a good long term solution and made it more difficult to keep track of revisions.
I created some documentation for vendors or partners that were contracted for U.S. News design work, but it was very bare bones and needed an update to align with brand aesthetics.
Web producers often used photos and illustrations that did not align with brand standards, but these were difficult to find and there was not long term training for it.
Brief
To create greater brand consistency, I pitched building new brand guidelines to create alignment across the organization on aesthetics and messaging. I created a cross-functional group to accomplish this, and did much of the writing and design layout for the final product.
Results
Many of these issues could be addressed with an encompassing branding guideline and internal communication plan. I began this effort when some other timelines aligned.
When a new Marketing lead started, I broached the subject and they agreed that it was an effort worth starting. I then needed to gain the CTO’s agreement that this was a project worth spending some of the team’s resources on as a cross-functional effort.
Since there was some existing documentation I collected everything I was aware of and pulled out any guidelines that were still relevant.
I began biweekly meetings with the Marketing lead and a design team member recruited for having experience in branding work. We used this opportunity to identify brand guidelines from other organizations we could reference to build a framework. Additionally we decided that one of the organization’s quarterly meetings was a great place to debut the guidelines.
The design team member and I drafted an outline and began writing the new guidelines using a combination of the older material I had collected, information about the design system I managed, and brand identity pieces like the organization’s vision and mission statement.
I began engaging other teams that had a stake in the brand guidelines, like the photo editor, videographer and lifecycle marketing teams to review existing material and get their feedback on how we could further expand the guidelines to cover common issues they saw, like photography that did not match our tone.
Guidelines for what badge designs to use for certain levels of prestige were a missing piece. For instance, you could not give a dishwasher the same accolade as a large hospital. I workshopped this direction with the Design Director and rolled it into the overall Guidelines.
While writing the copy, we had been engaging with the legal team to assure they were in the loop. When the copy was ready, we sent it to them for a review.
I had tried building some batch badge creation workflows in Figma, since so many designers were fluent in using it, but there were a number of issues around Figma’s fairly weak custom vector tools and its lack of CMYK support. Badges needed to be available for web advertising as well as print applications like out-of-home and magazines, so these technical hurdles needed to be overcome. Illustrator’s batching tools were inconsistent, so I invested time in using Affinity for this process. It allowed for some layout control that would scale elements of the design for more or less typography and allow for all of the batch and exporting options required. I created a template series for the badges so new badges could be started fresh with consistent sizing.
With the copy complete, it was time for layout. Since so few members of the team were familiar with InDesign and print reproduction wasn’t as important, I decided to use Figma as the main layout tool. This way we could retain better version control and the whole team can contribute if needed. I laid out the guidelines by creating custom components for headlines, body copy and different visual-aid layouts. I also built out a suite of design tokens that would change the layout to allow the same page assets to be used for both digital presentations and printable versions of the guidelines.
In addition to the layout, I designed a number of components to illustrate different design motif options in the guidelines, as well as comparative designs to show best practices and sub-optimal implementations of messaging, branded assets, photos or illustrations.
Solutions
Consistency and alignment across an organization are incredibly important for a brand experience. While branding direction can be communicated in a number of ways, it’s important to have a shared artifact that everyone in an organization can refer to for aesthetic and messaging direction. Without this the branding for U.S. News was often pulled in different directions between different parts of the organization. I strongly believed new brand guidelines would help create more cohesion, and could help address other challenges at the organization:
Ownership of branding efforts was nebulous so it was difficult to get consensus on updating or creating new branding documentation.
Brand look and feel was fragmented and inconsistent as design work was democratised into teams through freelancers and tools like Canva and Generative AI. This work was often not sent to the design team for feedback or review. Even within the design team there was some misalignment.
Branded messaging terminology and tone were inconsistent and content was being written with a wide variety of voices. The quality of this material was taking a hit.
Licensed badges are an important part of U.S. News’ branding and an important revenue stream, but were difficult to create en-masse and were prone to quality and formatting issues.
Badges did not have consistent rules around the display of different pieces of information, such as the organization or person winning the award, or their location. Which badge type being used for what type of accolade were also inconsistent, a liability for more prestigious badges.
Within U.S. News, there was not alot of pride or buzz around the brand, so there was a missed opportunity to increase morale.
The existing brand documents were hidden in random shared drives and not socialized to the rest of the organization. Additionally they were nearly a decade out of date. Since few designers on the team had print layout experience, the InDesign files for these previous designs were not a good long term solution and made it more difficult to keep track of revisions.
I created some documentation for vendors or partners that were contracted for U.S. News design work, but it was very bare bones and needed an update to align with brand aesthetics.
Web producers often used photos and illustrations that did not align with brand standards, but these were difficult to find and there was not long term training for it.
Challenges
To create greater brand consistency, I pitched building new brand guidelines to create alignment across the organization on aesthetics and messaging. I created a cross-functional group to accomplish this, and did much of the writing and design layout for the final product.