This piece is sponsored by Lemonly.

How do you create a brand that’s consistent and easy to use even as your company grows? That’s the goal of building a scalable brand.

A scalable brand gives every member of your team the tools they need to create exceptional work. It’s especially helpful when different teams have different needs such as:

• Sales teams that need on-brand presentations for new business pitches.
• Marketing teams that need quick, consistent content for social media.
• Design teams that need robust asset libraries and reliable standards for multiple materials.

No matter the use case, scalability means your brand can grow with you and adapt to your needs.

Lemonly, the Sioux Falls-based creative agency, works with businesses to create visual identities, messaging and brand standards that are easy to understand, fun to use, accessible for everyone and scalable for all the organization’s needs.

Watch Lemonly’s tutorial on building a brand that’s designed to scale with you as your company grows. Amy Moore, co-founder and executive creative director, shares tips for building a scalable brand and implementing your design system in platforms like Canva, Figma and other design tools.

Design system: The foundation of a scalable brand

A scalable brand is built on a set of design assets and guidelines that make content creation less of a headache. Templates, patterns, photo libraries, icon libraries — these are all pieces of a scalable brand. Together, your brand’s set of assets, standards and templates is called a design system.

Having these assets and guidelines handy makes it easier to ensure that 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.

Why your business needs a scalable brand

You need a brand that can grow and adapt as your company grows and encounters new design needs. 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.

The benefits of a scalable brand boil down to these three categories:

• Consistency: Consistency builds trust. When your brand looks, feels and sounds the same across every touchpoint, it reinforces credibility. Without scalable systems and guidelines, your brand gets fragmented — some pieces look on-brand while others look unpolished or outdated. That inconsistency erodes trust and tarnishes your credibility.
• Efficiency: Scalable brand assets save you time and money. They reduce design bottlenecks, empower nondesigners to create on-brand content and help ensure no one is reinventing the wheel. Your team can move quickly and still put out things that look good and build brand equity. 
• Future-proofing: Having a scalable brand means you’re prepared to adapt with whatever the next stage of your organization entails. You already have the assets, guidelines, rules and flexibility you need to take on new challenges and create content to support your evolving needs.

Four components of a scalable brand

An effective scalable brand provides both guidance and flexibility through a strong foundation, clear voice and tone, visual elements and established ground rules.

• Brand foundation: These key elements define who you are, like your mission, vision, core values and brand promise. Your brand foundation should be reflected in all the brand pieces that follow.
• Voice and tone guidelines: Your brand voice is your personality, which stays consistent across all your communication. Your tone adapts depending on the purpose and emotional quality of different messages.
• Visual elements: The building blocks of brand design include your logo, color palette, typefaces, patterns, icons, photos, illustrations and more. Establishing these visual elements and using them properly legitimizes your brand and builds credibility.
• Rules and flexibility: Having all the elements above isn’t enough unless people know how to use them the right way. Brand standards enforce norms for how your brand appears, while also allowing room for adaptation and creative interpretation across different use cases.

Six steps to design a brand that scales with you

Building a scalable brand means creating a system of repeatable design solutions so you don’t have to rely on one designer’s memory or one-off creative files. To create scalability, you need to tokenize your design: Create reusable elements that can be applied consistently across multiple areas — e.g., heading styles, button styles, header images, grid layouts, typography styles.

Let’s break it down into six key steps:

1. Audit: Take stock of the building blocks your team is using — logos, colors, typefaces, patterns, character designs, photos, templates, etc. — take note of what’s missing, and make sure everything feels cohesive with your larger brand presence. What do you already have, what’s working well, and what needs updating?
2. Fill in the gaps: Based on your audit, create pieces or make updates where you have gaps.
3. Write your rules: Document clear, easy-to-follow rules for using your brand assets. Things like: How large should icons be in print? Which logo version should be used on dark or light backgrounds? How should your team select photos from your photo library? Clear guidelines make decision-making easy so your team can create on-brand content with confidence.
4. Create templates: Templates democratize on-brand design — empowering everyone to create content from pre-established layouts that match your brand to a T. Your design system might include templates for social media graphics, banner ads, presentations, emails and more.
5. Centralize your brand kit: Store your brand assets and guidelines somewhere everyone can access, like one of the tools or platforms listed below. Put all your logo files, color palettes, typography styles, visual elements and templates in one place everyone can access and use.
6. Test and iterate: Refine your design system over time. Test for flexibility to make sure it works for different teams and use cases. Document situations when breaking the rules is OK, or cases where creating custom content is the best option. Your brand will evolve over time — keep your documentation up to date, and don’t be afraid to refresh things after a while.

There are a number of tools and platforms for implementing your design system. New tools are cropping up all the time, and the best tool for you will depend on your team’s skills, needs and existing tool set. Here are a few common ones:

• Canva Brand Kits
• PowerPoint or Google Slides templates
• Adobe Creative Cloud libraries
• Digital asset managers

Once you’ve established the building blocks for a scalable brand, you can implement your design system across one tool or multiple tools that suit your needs.

The secret ingredient for a scalable brand

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 more on what matters most: connecting with your customers.

Read more about building a scalable brand and subscribe to Lemonly on YouTube for more tips and tutorials about content marketing and visual storytelling.