It’s every creative team’s dream: Comprehensive, up-to-date and easily update-able brand guidelines that live in one place. During my time at Slack I helped take this ambition from theoretical to real, capping off the launch of the Slack brand center with a sweet showcase at Config 2023.
Sure, we had guidelines…
…like a very high-level 50-page PDF on slack.com and roughly 10,000 documents created in different formats and owned by different people for every individual element of our brand. Our “system” was inefficient and tedious to update and share, especially as Slack grew and we began to bring in more agencies and outside partners to take on more work.
Time for a new approach
We decided to create a one-stop online hub where anyone could get a much better understanding of our brand and access all the resources and information they needed to create on-brand work for Slack.
Senior Designer Gaby Saravia and I led a year-long effort to drive the creation of this hub, auditing all of our existing documentation and resources and translating it to an online experience. It all began with dozens of iterations of our homepage, which served as the entry point to our site.
Hierarchy is helpful
My primary role at the beginning of the project was to help collect and categorize our existing guidelines in order to inform our site navigation. This extremely unsexy slideshow offers a glimpse at how I think. Organization was not only key to this project but is always part of my process. It’s hard to describe how I achieve it other than to say I lay it all out, find the patterns, and move pieces around until they fit.
Page after page after page
To launch the site, we set out to create 18 pages, now neatly sorted into helpful navigational categories. As Copy Lead, I oversaw every word on every page—and wrote my fair share of pages myself. The core team we managed tackled two pages at a time across two teams. Through this process we began to figure out the standardized elements across each page. Every page featured detailed guidance, evidence of best practices, and links to resources.
It’s even better live on brand.slackhq.com.
Online and out in the world
In June 2023, Gaby and I brought stories of our false starts, fast pivots, and imperfect progress to Config 2023, Figma’s global design conference. Our session, “Messy, complicated, useful: building Slack’s brand guidelines,” gave a vulnerable look at how we grew into our roles and learned how to manage both the project and our team.
Company: Slack // Partners: Gaby Saravia, Audrey Molina, Zoe Berger (and most of the Slack Creative Team)