Brand: Artifact vs Operating System
Compare two mental models for brand: a static artifact (logos, guidelines, centralized control) and a living operating system (values, APIs, support, trust). See which choices fit your engineering team.
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Design Systems
4 posts about Design Systems. Every summary links to the original.
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Design Systems explainers
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How (and Why) We Refreshed Our Brand - The Intercom Blog
Intercom refreshed its brand after stress-testing the 2018 rebrand over several years, revealing scalability issues in illustration, color, typography, product visuals, and voice. The illustration style was difficult to replicate without a full-time illustrator, the mint-and-black color palette was constraining and at times appeared childish, and typography lacked personality. The team introduced thinner-lined illustrations with strategic usage guidelines, created a custom headline font called Honey complemented by Smile and Intercom Brand fonts, and reduced product abstraction to let the product itself do the heavy lifting. They defined voice characteristics as conversational, clear, confident, and delightful while avoiding goofy, oversimplified, flashy, or corporate tones to ensure consistent scaling. The year-long refresh was led by the internal Brand Studio, leveraging in-house talent across design, typography, and copywriting, and included an extensive brand audit.
Systems Thinking: How to Apply in Product Design [+Tips]
Systems thinking is a top-down design approach that considers the overarching system before diving into specific interface interactions, preventing premature detail fixation. It is based on Donella H. Meadows’ definition that a system is an interconnected set of elements coherently organized to achieve something, prompting questions about elements, interconnections, and purpose. For Intercom’s Articles product, the team identified the article as the core element and mapped how articles are created, delivered, and interact with other systems, resulting in a complex system diagram. This systems view revealed opportunities like an intelligent suggestion engine that recommends articles during conversations and allowed the team to prioritize the most important parts to build first. The approach also encouraged reusing the Messenger Reactions component for article feedback, sharing design and implementation details like hover effects and clicked states across contexts.
How to build a Content Design Agent
An overloaded solo content designer built VERBI, an AI content design agent, to scale standardized work without replacing human judgment or filling products with generic copy. The agent runs in Glean, using a curated collection of Intercom’s style guide, tone of voice, product and monetization glossaries, messaging guides, research, and official websites as retrieval-augmented generation sources. The system prompt defines its role, use cases, tone, and component rules, while a Glean Indexing API connection makes Storybook’s Surge design-system guidance available as a live source. Additional instructions tell VERBI to challenge users, avoid guessing when sources lack an answer, and keep responses concise. After 700+ triggers, the reported benefits are consistent content rules, faster drafts and iteration, fewer repetitive questions and errors, and more time for higher-impact design review.
Introducing eBay Evo: The Evolution of eBay’s Brand and Design System
eBay Evo is eBay’s new brand and design system, introduced to modernize and simplify customer experiences while creating a consistent global presence. The initiative reflects years of in-house work on a cohesive story that can still adapt to local markets and audience relevance, with an ongoing cycle of learning, product development, and enhancement aimed at discovery. Its accessibility focus includes the public Include accessibility annotations Figma plug-in, supporting inclusive design practices. The accompanying eBay Playbook gives internal teams and agency partners more than 280 pages of guidance, over 2,700 images and videos, and interactive tools for color selection, type testing, iconography, and accessibility. Evo’s new brand strategy is expressed through the creative platform “Things.People.Love.”
Related topics
- Accessibility1
- AI Agents1
- Illustration1
- Product Design1
- Retrieval-Augmented Generation1
- Systems Thinking1
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