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Harry BennettYour brand, now ready for the internet. ToolKit™ makes digital best-practice simple
“Here’s something I’m sure almost every designer can relate to,” Love + Money’s Founder & Managing Director Charl Laubscher tells us. “You pour months of love, craft and care into creating a brand for your client. You follow up with a robust, intricate brand system. You hand it over to the internal team, just making your crazy deadline. Three months later, you get a Slack notification that the brand is up, a website is live, and the result is... meh…”
All that work, what happened? The client has replaced the secondary colour palette with that gradient, so now you look like a fintech circa 2017. The tertiary serif is now in every single headline. The website just looks like… any other website. Only with your new logo on it. It’s a reality for brand designers, often resulting in a powerful emotional cocktail of frustration, upset, anxiety and defeat. Can this be avoided?
We can’t just give our clients rules. We have to give them tools.
For the last 10 years, Love + Money has been creating award-winning digital and branding work for clients all over the world, so they’ve had experience both handing off and receiving brand work for digital outputs. They think the problem caused by technology can be fixed by technology.
“Imagine being able to hand over your branding work to a client alongside a digital toolkit that enables them to access your whole brand system in a single online space. Imagine being able to plug your brand into the technology stack clients, product teams, marketing teams and developers use – Figma, React.JS, Shopify, Sanity CMS, Canva… even Chat GPT. Then imagine them using it to build with – and build on – your designs in a way that doesn’t make you want to cry, or quit your job, or both.
We can’t just give our clients rules. We have to give them tools.”
A digital brand platform for creatives and clients, ToolKit™ could be the answer. Far beyond outdated PDF guidelines, and even beyond standard off-the-shelf brand guideline platforms, ToolKit™ is a completely tailored digital branding solution, encompassing five distinct areas:
1 – Brand Strategy + Creative Direction
2 – Atomic Brand System (ABS)
3 – Interactive Guidelines + Digital Assets
4 – Design Templates
5 – Integrations
By translating your brand guidelines into a ToolKit™, you get an interactive and up-to-date website that allows internal teams and agency partners to work more closely together. With everyone working from the same source of truth, hand overs are far easier to manage as there are fewer parts of the brand to ‘hand over.’ ToolKit™ also comes with optional templates for Figma, Powerpoint, React and even Shopify. GPT integration? It’s got that too.
The foundation of any brand’s ToolKit™ is the Atomic Brand System – a Figma file housing all of the brand’s core information like colours, type and wordmarks, all set up to the rules of Atomic Design. Once that’s in place, Laubscher explains, “they’ll get two things – first, a preview of what their brand’s ToolKit™ website will look like, and secondly, a series of reusable templates for things like branded presentations, as well as social media posts and OOH touchpoints.” The file is connected via components and variants, and as Laubscher details, “if you need to make one small change (for instance, to colour), you’ll be able to see that flow through the whole system.”
“Once it’s up, it’s all powered by a CMS,” he adds, “so it’s simple for clients to log into and make small changes or tweaks to key elements… should they need to.”
Speaking practically of ToolKit™ ABS function, Laubscher recalls, “we’ve found our ABS actually makes designers both more productive and more creative,” creating a space for designers not to have to rethink every tiny creative move from the ground up in every interaction. “A designer knows that their work is ‘on-brand’ as a baseline,” he explains, “and by removing that mental load from a designer, it frees them up to focus on discrete areas where they might like to push their work a little,” a principle Love + Money have titled ‘Maximising Room for Magic.’
Download the Atomic Brand System Figma template
“The industry standard is that a DAM (Digital Asset Manager) houses brand guidelines as a PDF. We’ve basically flipped this. With ToolKit™, the brand guidelines actually house (and access) everything.”
Practically, that means that every ToolKit™ contains the core assets a brand needs to use most often – think logos, hex codes, typefaces and imagery. It also means that rather than having to download hex codes, you can copy them to your clipboard with a click. We house these on Dropbox if they need to be used outside Figma, but they’re also plugged directly into the client’s ABS.fig, meaning that designers can create digital-ready assets directly from there, too.
But ToolKit™ takes it a step further: it integrates your brand into some of the industry’s most popular technology, turning Figma designs into React.JS components on Gatsby; Shopify themes courtesy of Hydrogen; Canva templates for internal presentations and social media; and a GPT integration that constructs social posts based on your brand’s TOV and pairs them with custom type and image templates directly in ToolKit™’s UI.
300-page PDF brand guidelines don’t cut it anymore.
Looking at how the product came to be, Laubscher tells us, “we all get excited by the potential of ideas, and we all want to create brands that go deeper than surface level.” “But too often our world-changing ideas don’t make it past the creative direction presentation,” he notes, citing branding’s shift to digital and the move in-house as crucial figures in this industrial change.
“We asked over 150 designers from across the world what their biggest issues were with brand hand overs. Nearly 75% agreed that internal teams lacked the capabilities to execute their brand vision, or that the work was ultimately constrained by in-house capabilities. 84% of designers have noticed that more execution work has gone in-house, or to specialist agencies.”
“This leads to a pretty clear conclusion,” he details, “as agencies, we can’t do everything ourselves. But if we want the work to be done to our standard, we need to make sure we give our clients the tools they need to succeed. We think the challenge of the modern brand agency is no longer just ‘how do we make sure our brands are insightful, compelling, original, beautiful, intelligent, current, and classy?’, but also ‘how do we make our brand more usable?’”
When considering what’s already out there and what most design studios see as standard practice, it’s clear that, as Laubscher describes, “300-page PDF brand guidelines don’t cut it anymore,” especially not in the digital-first world branding largely exists within. “They’re about as progressive as Mad Men-era ideas of gender equality,” he jests, adding, “have you ever tried exporting a PDF from InDesign and giving it to a developer? That worked back in 2014, maybe…”
Joking aside, Laubscher remarks on how the current outdated forms of brand representation fundamentally aren’t representative. “Digital design has its own methodology, its own language; one that Adobe never quite got,” he notes, “that’s why they bought Figma. Probably.”
Looking ahead, Love + Money is continuing to evolve what ToolKit™ offers – including further AI integration, project tracking, and well as on-site, brand brief and asset builders directly within the website’s custom-built sidebar.
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