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Scaling scholar design system from 1 to 10 brands
The move from a single brand to multi-brand stack, and in particular all the great work undertaken with Rick, Murray, Mahir and Jon on the creation of the unified design system feels like a huge milestone in transitioning to a global, multi-brand business.
Natalie Proctor - Director of Brands
Problem
BPP has been acquiring many other smaller educators across the world all with separate products, websites and visual language.
The design system for BPP was planned to support only one brand. Theming was not to be included in the design system when it was developed in 2023.
Opportunity
There is significant value in harmonising these brands together with a common a visual language to create a family of brands that grow and connect experiences.
BPP intends to keep all brands on separate domains but allow for localisation and some individuality but with shared user behaviour and common interaction patterns.
Expectation
Migrate all brands front-end websites to the same platform as BPP and allow their brand to use Scholar design system.
Misson & Goals
BPP’s vision is to become a global provider of professional education. Supporting a new generation of learners.
Goals assigned to this project:
Increase number of new clients
Increase cross-sell
Lower support costs
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Team involved
Director of Brands
Senior Product Designers
Head of Product Design
Marketing Designers
Head of Creative Services
Product Manager
Engineers
Starting point
The brand team at BPP had already started investigations into the benefits and possibilities of a harmonised groups of brands with their strategy partners Wolff Olins.The team at Wolff Olins had created examples of how the brands can all share the same visual language but with a new overarching parent brand, called Lyceum.
Lyceum’s purpose is to connect these multiple brands showcasing the breadth of learning available as well as the global possibilities BPP (and the 10 other brands) could now offer.
This was our starting point. Wolff Olins had started a concept of all brands sharing the same colour palette and typefaces. Working with the Brand & Marketing team along with my team of Senior Product Designers we explored how we can manage developing our design system to provide the base visual language for over 10 brands.
Original concept to allow all brands to share the same visual language.
Famous last words
M: Will our design system need theming in the future?
J: Don’t worry about theming, Scholar needs to work for just BPP alone.
M: Ok but are you sure? I can see the business has acquired several new brands recently.
J: Yes, just focus on one brand
M: Hmm, ok, because it’ll be harder to unpick a design system to introduce theming at a later date.
J: I understand, but stick with just BPP.
I initiated the thinking for the designers by encouraging them to consider how much a brand needs to be articulated through the design system. This would allow us to set the expectation and scope of work needed.
No theming
Theming runs through every component and token
We discovered pretty quickly that using exactly the same brand elements and design system for each brand was creating a homogenous experience. This lead to a lack of flexibility. Ultimately too much consistency led to ‘blanding’.
“The turning point for me was realising the design system can be so much more flexible.”
Senior Marketing Designer
Workshop
We connected with the Brand and Marketing designers. Held a 2-day workshop to begin to set the basis of new brand system. By pairing with other designers we were able to define the flexibilities needed to ensure all products and brands could have their needs met and harmonise a growing business.
time to pause and reflect
This was a moment where I reset the teams thought processes. Returned to basics and defining the art of the possible.
This led us to dispel some myths around design systems and find the balance the business was really looking for versus direction defined by our marketing agency.
Scholar first approach
We started a new phase of project using the design system as the starting point
Resetting the process between all teams and giving a new starting point of the Design System not only reinvigorated our passion and thought for craft but also helped teams to understand deeper the value of design systems and how they can bridge all teams and media types.
Tokens can seem an abstract concept but once we had illustrated the value and flexibility tokens can give us this really unlocked a new level of collaboration and understanding between our teams.
Flexibility in tokens
Our design system platform was the key to unlocking the flexibility needed for this entire project.
We now needed to consider the scale of the impact and amount of effort.
This proposal was ambitious but indicated a scalable approach for the business migrating brands into the family.
We were able to show that through the use of tokens we could give each brand a flavour that would allow them to have some ownership over their presentation and tone all while clearly remaining part of the Lyceum family.
Our next target was to ensure this could be achieved without causing significant engineering effort or tech debt.
Enter the communication model.
The bridge interprets and translates design and development context without creating a dependency on one centralised source of truth.
Context provided from designers and developers to allow:
Multi-brand tokens/components based tasks to be implemented quicker
Audit existing components between design and development
Save time and financial resource on Design System related tasks
impact & results
90 mins
average time to build and publish webpages
~2 sprints quicker
on subsequent build times for new platforms
93/100
SEO rating
+250%
increase in brand awareness
94/100
Accessibility rating
+£25,000,00
improved value to the business in the last year alone (this will continue to increase)
“The standard, quality and process in getting this
delivered has been seamless,
and the feedback from across
the business on the updated brands, and their collateral,
has been fantastic”
The brand and marketing team are now using tokens when they create content 🤯😍
“This has been such a new way of working for me but I’ve really enjoyed the approach. I can’t wait to work more with you folk in Product & Technology”
“I’ve worked on design systems for a while but never on something a progressive as this.”