How To Create Design And Brand Systems

How's my favorite businessman, founder and self-made entrepreneur? Hi Alex, I'm doing well. How about you? Are you still not regretting your move away from being employed as a product manager? Nope, not at all. It's the opposite. I'm keeping myself busy. Especially after our last episode that product managers don't have a reason to exist. Yeah, I'm still waiting for the shitstorm to come. I mean, some of the comments were quite wild, I have to say. I told you, people will feel offended. I mean, it wouldn't be fun if they wouldn't be, right? That's why we're doing this. Not for the love, only for the hate. But I have a topic today that you love, which is design. Just to bring everyone up to speed, I'm recently re-ramping my website and automizing things a lot with automation that I'm building. And I'm a big fan of the 8-bit style. I love 8-bits. I mean, the Product Bakery croissant is also 8-bits. So with that said, I just thought, hey, I could apply this 8-bit style for myself. Because I used to play Game Boy, Super Nintendo, everything. I mean, it's like, if I can say in two words what Christian is, then I would say 8-bits. And Alex is recently giving me a lot of design feedback regarding my visuals that I'm creating. And I thought, instead of discussing the topic twice, we can just do it today in the episode. If you're up for a kind of live recorded consulting session. Free consulting? Free consulting, yeah. Of course. Well, here's the thing. I decided to be visible on a couple of different platforms, like on web with my website, Instagram and LinkedIn. And of course, I also have YouTube and a newsletter. So five different channels at the moment. And of course, we're also doing this podcast, kind of, which would be the sixth channel. And I'm thinking now, okay, when it comes to branding, to design, and also how I design everything and want to represent myself on these platforms, I'm starting to think of a kind of design system, so to say. I'm not sure if that's the right wording, but I need like a common… Because I'm lazy, you know. So I would like to have a couple of guidelines or templates slash, I don't know, visuals that I can reuse for the different channels, right? So ideally, I have a similar style on Instagram, like on YouTube, for example, or my website is a similar design to all the other platforms. And while I'm now starting to design those things, I'm realizing, okay, every day there is a new idea on how I can design things different to make them easier. Then I realize, oh, okay, I have forgotten about this edge case or this format. So I'm a little bit overwhelmed. I mean, I'm solving this problem with manpower and touching things twice and multiple times. But I would like to make my life as easy as possible. And I'm trying to understand if there is an approach to be as efficient and effective as possible. I mean, approach-wise, I would say that coming from the traditional design processes and how you approach it, the best way to start one of these things is to just like work in the most abstract way possible, right? Because the heavy lifting comes specifically from spending a lot of time on details early on. So you're already trying to define a specific detail for, let's say, I mean, you mentioned all the channels, let's say the Instagram channel. Yes. Now you're doing something on the website. And now you see, okay, here I need to do something else. So I mean, basically what you want to do is A, at the beginning, spend some time in gathering all the different information, writing down all the different things that you are planning to post as much as you can, right? What is the content that's going to be in videos? What is the content that's going to be on the posts that you make on LinkedIn and Instagram? What is the content on the website? And then you can start like clustering it, grouping it, or just building a bit of a hierarchy so that you start identifying what are the building blocks that can help me towards this. Or you can say this first phase that you now just did is like the, when you talk about double diamonds, you're converging, right? You're trying to get all this information in. And the next step would be, and this is a really important one, where I see even very senior designers sometimes like skipping this step just because they are so experienced. It's like really staying in a low fidelity space. Like with the least amount of effort and detail, try to map out these things because that's where you can then see what are the patterns, what are the similarities, how many different levels of titles do I need, how many different levels of let's say layers, foreground, background, and so on. And all of that before you start going deeper on the details. Because once you're in the details, you waste a lot of time, right? Because you spend a lot of time thinking it through and then you might find three days later as you're working on a new format, oh shit, I actually need the possibility to have it. Now I'm making stupid examples, but to have a button with an icon, but when I add the icon breaks the button over there. Yeah, Alex, but here's the thing. Everything you're saying right now is, you're worth your money. Because everything you're saying sounds familiar and I think we have maybe talked about these processes as well in the past, but once you're doing this stuff for yourself, like I am, I'm ending up in getting lost in details, which I did. So that's the reason why I shouldn't exist as product manager. But that's what I mentioned, right? It's fairly normal. I even see it, I see it with how I sometimes approach work. I see it how some of my colleagues approach work. It's just like when you're then on like deep into the weeds, it's like, oh yeah, you're working on this thing and then you have your first idea and your second idea and you throw it in. And I'm not saying it's necessarily bad to also have like some, to sketch down some high fidelity ideas, but that's then, that goes to the mood board. That is like, okay, this is how things can potentially look. But it's really important that you get this like first structure, make charts, write it down in mind maps, make tables, try to group things together. That is so extremely helpful because, and I mean, one of the skills I try to assess when I hire designers or when I talk to designers is also the ability to think in systems. And this is like then, like once you are at this level of abstraction, it's interesting to see how can someone abstract, see patterns, identify these things that then helps you create the system. You mentioned design system, right? I mean, design systems are usually referred to in the word of interface design when it comes to, okay, how do I structure it? But it can be way broader and you can apply it to everything. But it's important, like the system part is important because it's about identifying how can different things play together? What happens if I make something here? How could I leverage it? How could I simplify it? And so on and so forth. So I think it's a common problem that's not just something you're faced with as a, I would say, non-designer approaching this for the first time. But it's something that very senior people also have issues with, sometimes coming from another aspect because they think they already know it and they don't have to spend the time. And it's good to remind yourself and remind your colleagues or your team that it is important to not skip the steps. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you're helping me a lot already because I created a little mind map to just get a general overview on what channels I have and what potentially design could look like. But I didn't think about the content and maybe some rules and some patterns, right? First of all, some patterns, and then I can derive some rules for those. And this is now what is helping me right now to take on as a next task before I die in beautiness. It's a German phrase. And to die in details, to first of all, take a step back. Yeah. And I think maybe a couple of hours are enough, but then I will maybe quickly unblock and disentangle myself. That's the right word, yeah. But there's another challenge, highly emotional thing. Next topic from my side, we're going through this coaching as efficient as possible. So at the moment, and I know maybe some designers who are tuning in right now will get goosebumps in a negative way, but I'm using Canva because I'm not a designer. Even I'm getting goosebumps. Yeah. Okay. Sorry for that. Brother, brother. You know that? Okay. Sounds funny. Cultural hole here. So I'm using Canva at the moment and I'm very fast with Canva. It's very easy, but it's also not really scalable in my opinion. Maybe I'm not good at, maybe some Canva pros will laugh now and say, hey, you're just using it wrong. But I was thinking about changing a tool. And here's now the emotional part. Many years ago, I think more than 10 years ago, I was trying out Photoshop and I was completely overwhelmed with these layers and all that kind of shit. And I was like, oh, this is too complicated to me. And then I never touched it again. Now I started working with Webflow, the website builder. And there's also like this kind of layer-ish structure and I was like, okay, I'm getting, it's coming back to me. So maybe sooner or later, I have to deal with that whole stuff. So now I'm asking myself, okay, is it worth investing time in a new tool? And getting familiar with, for example, Figma, where I can also, I mean, I see you, I saw you designing in Figma and I know you can also automate things and create nice templates and reuse it, which is maybe more scalable in the long run. Yeah. So this is right now a kind of brain fog that I have and I don't know what to do. So should I stay with Canva and do it the tough and hard way? Should I rather learn a new tool, which costs, of course, time and is a kind of investment? What would you do in my shoes? I mean, I would start by analyzing what you need to do, right? That's as always the first step. What are you trying to achieve? Can you do it with Canva? How costly is it? I mean, I think generally speaking, nowadays, I believe that the learning curve for tools, especially in this space, isn't very big. So Figma, you can probably get into Figma relatively quick. Yeah. Same with a lot of other tools, right? It's not like back in the days, you had to learn how Blender works for 3D renderings and every shortcut on the keyboard was different. And if you didn't know the shortcuts, you were pretty much fucked. So you have to first start with a book and then you can use it. Yeah. So the tools are all fairly simple. So then it comes down to, okay, which tool serves your purpose best? And I think Canva is just extremely simple. So probably going into a tool that gives you more flexibility and more freedom might make sense. I think the other question is how much of it can be done directly in Webflow? I mean, they already sell it as the designing tool and you can then have components and you can reuse them and so on. Obviously, not so helpful when you then need to use it on other platforms that are not web. So Instagram, LinkedIn and so on. I mean, personally and without making it emotional or anything, Figma is obviously a great tool for these things. Yeah, I was thinking about the same thing. And I mean, something that I'm also thinking of, I mean, since you know that I'm using Make and stuff like this, I believe Zapier Make and all these kind of automation tools also have integrations towards Figma. Oh, yeah. OK, so great, because I try to automate everything at the end of the day. Automation is key for my tooling, right? I mean, I'm going away from Squarespace, for example, to Webflow because I can push automated, I can automate content creation and push it towards Webflow with automation tools. Figma is very powerful when it comes to that and you can write your own plugins even if you want. And there are two benefits, right? The first benefit is for myself because my content creation will get much easier. And secondly, if it works for me, it will work for others so I can create a little product out of it. OK, so that makes my decision also easier because today I was just spending one hour, that's not true, it's 25 minutes because double speed, on a Webflow tutorial and was really easy and everything I needed to learn and I want to build, I just learned in a tutorial. It was called the only Webflow tutorial you need and the guy was right, it's the only Webflow tutorial I needed and maybe I should do the same thing with Figma, yeah, that's helping. Yeah, Figma is straightforward, Figma is quite easy and I think it's luckily software development or software apps, not software development, but apps in this space improved a lot. I don't know how Photoshop ever became the tool for web design. Like that's fucking madness. It's a tool that was never supposed to be that. It is completely weird to use. I mean, yes, layers, we all use layers, even use layers in Canva when you say back and forth, right? It's just like a different mental model, how you think about them when you can actually see them or you just like move it in front or back like Photoshop, like Canva or PowerPoint or whatever. But Photoshop as a web design tool was the weirdest shit on earth. It was, I mean, yeah. It really hits an old nerve. Yeah, yeah. All right. Okay. These are two very important things you told me, first of all, to sketch down the needs and the different platforms and what I want to do, to be as abstract as possible as first step and then a second step to also better optimize my design process, I think I'll be better suited with Figma. Yeah. Wow. Well, I don't have any further questions. How much do I owe you? For you, it's free for everyone in the community is free. So if there is other questions that we should cover, obviously shoot us an email or leave a comment. But more importantly, make sure to subscribe so that you also capture all these updates. Yeah. And one thing I'm also doing for the people who are interested, I'm documenting everything I'm doing. I'm writing my decision log and I will at some point publish everything. So if you want to follow the process or if you're interested in the current work in progress, then let us know. I'm happy to share. Amazing. Then happy building and see you next week. Thank you very much, Alex. Bye bye. This was the Product Bakery. All links can be found in the podcast description and make sure to follow and subscribe for weekly episodes on all podcast platforms as well as YouTube.