Creating Cohesion On a Multi-Brand Website
Building a cohesive site experience is never easy when you have multiple brands coexisting as peers. Brand identity is critical and no one wants to compromise. The result is usually more like a food court than a tasting menu: Your options happen to be in the same place but that doesn’t mean they belong together.
Our client—a large pet care company with numerous sub-brands—wanted to create a system that would let them preserve brand identity while presenting a cohesive front.
My Role: I was late to this party, coming in to replace a design lead who was rolling off the project. Among other development support and emerging strategy work, I focused on setting the brands up for success in the new system through education and documentation. I led the documentation content and strategy, and partnered with a visual designer to make sure it was simple and clear.
Lead a Pet to Water
Although the new CMS and corresponding component library brought a lot of standardization, brands still had the freedom to design their own pages in Figma using the components. I knew a careful rollout would be needed to help brands begin with confidence and minimize translation from design to CMS.
We created a Quick Start Guide to get brand designers up to speed, walking through the key concepts of the new component system. To promote consistency, we focused the guide on the types of customization the CMS could—and couldn’t—accommodate.
The Road Most Traveled
Easily the number one problem with documentation is that it rarely gets used. Problem number two is that it quickly falls out of date. For the Quick Start Guide to be useful in the long run, I knew we had to solve for both issues.
The first step was to turn the guide itself into a component and put an instance in each brand’s working Figma file. This way, it both lived where designers would use it and could be updated centrally. I also included links to and from other key documentation.
Finally, to make sure ownership was clear, I included contact information for the subject matter expert responsible for maintaining the guide. When designers had questions or change requests, they would know exactly where to go.