A style guide helps a brand remain consistent, allowing the brand to scale and mature in a uniform way; it helps a brand keep their positioning and brand voice focused, resulting in consistent messaging regardless of the medium or the scale.

Creating a brand style guide is usually done in the first phase of a startup or during a re-brand, along with the accompanying logo, name, etc.

What happens when a company scales before it has a style guide in place, or rapid growth causes the company to outgrow their current style guide?

Real-World Example: Pure Storage

Recently I’ve been working with Pure Storage, an enterprise data storage company. Pure is a ~2,600-person, multi-billion-dollar public company ($PSTG); they are a global company with a large enterprise site (1,191 unique urls at the time of this article) and a strong brand identity.

Pure’s small-but-nimble Creative Team has a core style guide for the brand that is used as the foundation of everything Pure designs, but the guide doesn’t get into specifics much beyond logo, colors, and typeface.

The Creative Team has overseen all creative assets, concepts, brand voice etc.

but as the company has scaled the (very-talented) Creative Team has become overworked; it’s difficult to remain consistent with so many agencies and partners creating assets, and every Creative Team member’s bus number is really high.

I was brought in to help establish Web UX, Strategy & Design principles and tools.

This was a unique challenge: the brand was already very established and active, but there were no documented guidelines for additional teams / partner agencies to follow; everything was in the Creative Team’s brains and not on paper.

The site runs on Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) so the back end is pretty organized and structured, but the presentation layer needed some help.

I needed to establish a baseline Design System that was:

A) 100% aligned with the Creative Team’s brand vision

B) Consistent with what is live currently on the site

C) Organized enough to act as a baseline foundation

My solution to this problem is what I’m calling a “Passive Style Guide”.

In this article I’m going to outline my process.