Designers have always held brand guides in high regard, but the honest truth is that a guide is a workhorse, not a show pony. Over several iterations of building and managing our digital brand guide, I balanced diverse stakeholder requests—from fresh photography direction and new typography requests from execs to custom iconography and architectural applications. Yet through it all, user data proved they needed two core things above all else: accurate color values and instant access to downloadable logos.

Every version we built optimized ruthlessly for those two fundamentals while still telling the broader story our brand team needed to communicate.

This latest release was particularly exciting. We launched Dell’s biggest brand update since the largest acquisition in tech history. The core system was built around tone-on-tone color palettes and five rhythmic patterns. Rather than just creating standalone guidelines pages, we designed the layout of the digital brand guide itself to demonstrate proper usage of these new elements in real time. Within the first few weeks of launch, daily traffic soared to 5x normal levels.