When Brand Growth Turns Into Brand Chaos

Most early-stage brands are born with speed and pure instinct.

You design a logo, pick a few colors, spin up a landing page, create your social channels, and call it “branding.”

Now, fast forward a year.

Internal teams are building new products, campaigns, and sales decks using different fonts, colors, and graphic styles. 

A pitch deck that doesn’t match your website. Product screenshots with old icons and outdated designs. Your social channels each feel like they’re from an entirely different brand.

And you, the founder or the head of marketing, are stuck in the middle—approving everything because no one else knows what “on-brand” means anymore—or they never did.

That’s not just annoying and stressful. It’s downright dangerous.

Confusion erodes credibility and always kills conversion.
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The Solution Isn’t More Branding. It’s a Brand System.

The answer is rarely to start from scratch or to rebrand your company.

Instead, you need to find alignment with your brand—first by auditing your existing brand and then creating a cohesive brand system.

A brand system is what turns scattered assets into a refined brand. These systems have many names and are used in more than just branding and marketing. You may have heard them called one of the following:

• Brand Systems
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• Brand Toolkits
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• Style Guides
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• Brand Guidelines
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• Living Brand Guidelines
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• Design Asset Libraries
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• Design Systems
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Unlike traditional guides, a brand system is not just a reference manual showcasing logos and colors. Instead, it’s a living framework for how your brand shows up everywhere and all the materials used to design assets.

A brand system, when done correctly, ensures that:

→ Everyone on your team(s) creates with the same tools, materials, rules, and reference points.

→ Your brand evolves intentionally, not randomly mutating over time.

→ You don’t reinvent the wheel when launching something new for your brand.

What a Brand System Includes

Every company’s brand is unique, and the same goes for the brand system they will deploy.

However, that being said, a proper brand system—one that goes beyond a traditional PDF style guide—should include the following:
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• A Living  Brand Guidelines — The rules and regulations for visual assets—logos, color, typography, layout.—that are not static but continuously updated as your brand evolves.
  
  
• Voice & Tone Framework — How your brand sounds across all your touchpoints and channels—not just for copywriters but anyone who writes or touches copy for your brand.
  
  
• Brand  & Design Templates — Any designs or documents created—sales decks, lead magnets, ads, social posts, emails, product screenshots—to save time and energy in the future.
  
  
• Figma Design Library/ Toolkit — A Figma file where all design assets, brand elements, templates, guides, and more are centralized would also be where the living brand guidelines and the design templates are stored.
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What makes or breaks a brand system is that it’s shareable, editable, and utilized daily by your organization.
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It’s not buried in a folder and forgotten like most brand guidelines are—collecting dust.

Real Brands That Scale With Systems

Great design isn’t what makes brands great. It’s the systems behind the brands.

Here are a few brands that utilize an effective brand system to achieve their goals and are leaders in their industries.
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Airbnb‍

Global cohesion with hyper-local flexibility

Airbnb’s brand system, centered around the Bélo symbol of belonging, is a masterclass in emotional resonance paired with structural scalability. Their success isn’t just about listings—it’s about trust. Their brand system is why trust shows up, city after city, host after host.
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• Visual Identity: Custom typeface, warm photography, consistent iconography, and universal color palette.
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• Brand Toolkit: Their design language system enables hosts, marketers, and developers to maintain coherence, even across thousands of local markets.
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• UX Consistency: Every digital product—from the booking flow to neighborhood guides—feels unmistakably “Airbnb.”
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• Localization Strategy: The brand system allows for cultural relevance without breaking the brand (e.g., imagery, tone, and content adapted by region).
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Intercom

Conversational brand voice backed by modular, scalable visuals
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Intercom built a brand system that’s as friendly and responsive as its software. Their brand system makes their product feel human—even when you’re deep in a SaaS workflow.
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• Voice & Tone: Clear, casual, and confident across help docs, product UI, onboarding flows, and blog content.
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• Illustration System: Their expressive, abstract illustration style became iconic—and was built with rules to scale across use cases.
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• Product + Marketing Alignment: The same design principles used in marketing apply inside the product UI, reinforcing cohesion.
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• Component Libraries: Intercom uses shared visual libraries (Figma, etc.) to maintain consistency across growth, sales, and support teams.

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IBM

Enterprise-grade precision governed by a legendary design legacy

IBM's brand system—specifically the Carbon Design System—is a gold standard for enterprise branding. Their design system doesn’t just support branding—it enables innovation at scale.
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• Design Legacy: Originally shaped by Paul Rand and Eliot Noyes, IBM’s philosophy emphasizes simplicity, clarity, and modularity.
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• Carbon Design System: This open-source design system governs UI, accessibility, iconography, color, and typography across all products and platforms.
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• Guidelines for Scale: IBM’s system supports thousands of products and teams across the globe, including public documentation for design and development handoff.
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• Typography + Grid System: Their famous 8pt grid, IBM Plex font, and layout guidelines ensure global design integrity.

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Asana

Balance of functional UX clarity and expressive brand storytelling

Asana’s brand system is grounded in clarity but with just enough personality to feel human. Their system makes it easy for design, growth, and content teams to build trust and deliver clarity without guessing.
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• Visual Language: A soft yet professional aesthetic—rounded shapes, warm gradients, and a highly systematized use of their signature three-dot logo.
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• Content System: Asana’s documentation, blog, and in-app tutorials are all written in a clear, helpful tone with consistent visual formatting.
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• Motion Design: Microinteractions and animations are part of the system—used sparingly but strategically to reinforce product delight.
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• Design System Tools: Their design system (sometimes called Origami) includes detailed Figma libraries, writing guidelines, and scalable UI components.

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How We Build a Brand System

(Without Burning Too Much Time & Money)

Here’s how we go about building a brand system for our clients. These five steps have been simplified for this article to give you an overview of our process.
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Step 1: Audit What Already Exists

Pull together your design assets, brand elements, touchpoints, marketing materials—everything, regardless of how big or small. Ask yourself what’s working versus what’s not working. Be sure to look through the lens of your customers, not just your own bias.

(In case you’re interested, we have a 5-Minute Brand Scorecard that can give you a birds-eye view of your brand’s health.)

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Step 2: Start with your Core Brand Elements

First, codify your brand elements—logo variations, color styles, typography, patterns and textures, voice and tone principles—the basic building blocks of all design touchpoints. 

This is where you will work to organize your elements and make any refinements and expansions—though be careful not to go overboard here. Once you have developed a baseline brand system, you can continually evolve and expand your brand.
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Step 3: Templatize Repeated Assets

Develop templates for any assets that are utilized again and again. You’re constantly creating or recreating these assets—social posts, ads, sales decks, and landing pages.

Create drag-and-drop templates for all of these and any future assets. They will take time to build in the short term, but in the long term, they will save you time and resources—if they’re done right.

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Step 4: Choose the Right Tools

All of our clients use Figma as their primary design tool. With that in mind, we suggest using tools you work with daily. We use Figma for our brand systems because it's an excellent tool for design systems and toolkits, allowing you to create libraries for all your designs.

Depending on your size and capabilities, you can use other tools such as Canva—which allows you to create your brand systems that can be paired with their templates to create social content.

It’s essential to ensure your brand system is implemented in whatever software your team uses to create designs—Figma, Canva, Adobe Express, etc.

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Step 5: Assign a Brand Champion(s)

Your system needs a person or team to oversee and ensure rules are followed, and your brand doesn’t mutate. This team will maintain the system and ensure it continues to evolve rather than stagnate. 

Your brand system is not a one-time project but a living system. Your brand champion(s) are your first line of defense in keeping your brand aligned and cohesive across all your teams, channels, and brand touchpoints.

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Why This Matters at Every Stage

→ Pre-Seed Startup — You need to move fast without looking sloppy. Investors and customers alike won’t take you seriously, nor will they trust you can solve their problems or provide a working product if your brand looks like it just got out of bed.

→ Seed Funding to Series A Startup — You’re growing and expanding your team constantly. Alignment, especially early on, saves you time and continues to build trust over time.

→ Series B to Profitable Startup — You’re scaling outward and at a breakneck pace. All of your partners, investors, customers, and especially your new hires need clarity into who you are, what you do, and what makes up your brand.

Without a brand system, every new hire becomes a new interpretation of your brand. Think of it as playing a game of telephone with your brand—each new hire bringing their interpretations to the table. 

Making each new launch a gamble and a potential design debt source erodes your brand equity.

Your Brand Should Work Harder Than You Do

Founders and heads of marketing can’t be the final quality control check for every design or piece of content.
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When you have a scalable brand system, your brand holds itself together—whether you’re overseeing it or have a brand champion defending it.

Do you need help building your brand system from what you already have?
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Let’s talk. We’ll show you how to turn your fragmented assets into a brand that scales. Book a call today for a free consultation.

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