Don’t Drown in a Sea of Same. Unify Your Product Language. Watch Sales Rise.

Regardless of the industries they operate in, brands need a distinct visual and behavioral identity to differentiate themselves. A strong Product Design Language (PDL) provides a foundation for:

• Clarity and Focus: It guides product development by translating brand values into tangible design elements.
• Scalability: It streamlines product creation by providing a design system across present and future products.
• Brand Consistency: It ensures a unified look and feel across product lines, strengthening brand recognition.
• Emotional Connection: It fosters a deeper brand-customer connection by conveying brand personality through design.
• Design Efficiency: A PDL streamlines product development by providing clear guidelines and reusable elements.
• Faster Time-to-Market: A PDL reduces design decision-making, accelerating product development.
• Reduced Costs: Standardization minimizes design iterations and production complexities.

The Building Blocks of a Design Language Guide

1. Core Purpose, Values, and Meaning:

• Define your brand’s core purpose – the reason you exist and the difference you aim to make.
• Identify your brand values – a limited set of core principles guiding your actions.
• Conduct user research to understand your target audience and their needs.

2. Brand Tone & Visual Positioning:

• Translate your brand values into a consistent tone across all communication channels.
• Use visual positioning tools to analyze competitor products and identify a unique visual space for your brand.

3. Design Principles:

• Establish a set of design principles that reflect your brand values and guide how your products should interact with users.
• These principles should be thematic and macro-level, focusing on the overall user experience.

4. Signature Elements:

• These are the most tangible expressions of your brand identity, translating design principles into specific design elements.
• Signature elements can include not just form mentioned above, but also light, sound, and interactive behaviors.

If you have a range of products that users will interact with, it is imperative that you invest in developing a product design language that represents your voice, vision, mission and values. That said, products that are mostly invisible i.e. they reside away from public view, may not need a unified design approach. This will depend on the maturity of your industry and the customer acquisition process

Depending on your product type, expect your guide to cover how the design language can be applied first to your existing product line. And also how to scale it across your refreshes, incremental improvements, and fundamentally new products.

Product images (necessary), 3D models, if you have them, of your existing products, your industry, a description of your business and your brand values.

Some of our best work has been with brands that were previously buying from ODMs in China, Taiwan and Korea, and re-branding their products. The ensuing visual clutter was affecting their market positioning. While they retained their existing relationships, creating a new and unique design language for themselves, made it much easier to both customize products for their own brand, and also to build a loyal customer base. So, the answer is yes. So long as your production and trading partners can customize for you, getting a unique design language is a net good thing to have.

We use industry standard processes to develop an additional layer over popular AI tools. The tools return novel moodboards that provide possible style design directions for your brand. Ultimately human expertise finalizes the guide.

Yes of course, you get it in a fully customizable format

Some businesses have complex brand and product structures and legacy constraints. Should the process take significantly longer than 140 hours over a 30 calendar day period, then we recommend that you sign up for one of our popular long term subscription plans

Over the years, we have crafted and honed a practice to create these guides at scale. Saving several weeks, if not months.

Outcomes vary by brand and marketing teams. But it is safe to say that brand consistency from implementing a common design language across products, results in both faster design cycles, even with external stakeholders, faster and easier recognition, and faster sales.

Yes, of course. You can choose to subscribe to our other award winning services across design, engineering and marketing.