Design Systems for a Brand Team
Jan 6, 2026
Every tech company begins to focus on the systemization of design as it transitions between early stage and mid-market. Often these teams bring in a dedicated product designer who's job is to act as the steward for consistency and structure within the product. But what happens when the product and marketing teams are separated?
For as long as I have been a designer on a brand team, I have been the de-facto systems designer. It's a niche that I have happily taken on as a side-project at every role because it helps me make sense of chaos. I've come to learn a few important tidbits from this self-given role.
Most designers, and especially brand designers! hate building structured systems. (think of the countless memes of a designers desktop covered in files named something like final_final_pleasebethelastfile.png
A structured design system doesn't have to exclusively be for product teams. They can drastically speed up a workflow of brand marketing teams, once you've gone far enough for your team to adopt it.
It's often hard to advocate for this work on a small marketing team, where deadlines are flying towards you at a near-dizzying pace and priorities are constantly shifting. But once that work is done, every designer on the team will question why it wasn't made in the first place!
Wondering why this work is so impactful, and yet so despised by most brand designers? Let me break it down:
(Most) designers hate building structured systems
This might be a generalization, but it's something I have noticed repeatedly in organizations. When you ask a graphic designer why they got into marketing, the odds are that the answers are going to look a little something like this:
"I'm inspired by the arts, fashion, and creative industries."
"I wanted to find an avenue to express myself visually"
"I love experimenting and seeing what sticks"
In contrast, building a design system often requires someone who is more concerned with the systems than the decorations. These are designers that are thinking more about usability patterns. They see designs as components over pages, and they often prefer rules over vibes. They want to create systems that speed up processes, and often this requires rigid structure, organization and big-picture thinking.
At first glance this might not seem to click with brand marketing, which often feels very vibes based. But I promise there is a niche!
How a design system benefits marketers
Picture this: The growth team has come knocking again. This time they're looking for 120 new paid ads(!) Without a design system, all of these ads now need to be generated manually. Now you need to go through and create paid ads for every single break point. And if you have a new designer (or maybe an external freelancer) on the team, you now need to hope that they get your font styles, colours and spacing right.
But with a dedicated system, maybe you can automate pieces of this. Maybe that's using predetermined font pairings, for each display size, so you can simply swap out the photos. Or you can ensure that the correct hex code or spacing is being used, ensuring consistency across all your designs.
Not convinced? Maybe an even bigger use-case will influence you. Most marketing teams run the front-facing website for their companies. By creating a consistent design system in Figma, it becomes easier to design with repeating components, keep consistency across your site (no matter how many pages you have!) and systemize the handoff between design and dev.
Even more enticing, as new AI vibe-coding tools become more prevalent, a design system will make it easier to connect your designs to a workflow to automate page builds. The only thing required is alignment between your code-base and design files.
Why is a design system so hard to advocate for?
Marketing for an internal team is a fast-paced world, with constant deliverables. The brand design team is often beholden to other marketers, and often also creating assets for internal comms, like town hall decks, company swag, sales one-pagers, corporate comms files for HR, etc. That's a lot of work for an often lean team.
With all of these tasks piling up, it sounds like a design system would be a life-saver, so wouldn't it make sense to be a priority? In an ideal world it would be, but a design system is often labour intensive to build. And here lies the problem for designers. It's often impossible for designers to be pulled away for long stretches of time. Unlike a mid-market product team that likely has a design-systems specialist, the brand team is often wearing many hats.
But brand designers don't need to despair. There is hope!
Getting a system started
As I mentioned at the start of this article, I have always tackled the design system side for our brand team. It always went a little something like this:
I mention we should have a design system, but we don't have the capacity to build it
On my own, I begin to optimize some of our most-labour intensive projects with repeatable patterns
The other designers see the progress + relative ease of the new workflows, and agree that we should commit more effort
I am now officially allocated a small portion of my time to building these workflows
It can be hard for teams to see the value of this work based on a brief, so I often find that creating a small but tangible real-life example of the time savings + optimizations is more impactful for the team.
On occasion I have also seen fellow brand designers feel their ability to be creative is threatened by more systemized design. That doesn't necessarily have to be true though. A design system can be as liberal or restrictive as you choose. For areas where creativity needs to be retained, maybe your team will choose to limit the guardrails only to what's necessary. In social media for example, this could look like creating a template that includes logos in specific safe-zones, and leaving the rest as a blank slate for the social content specialist. The goal is to find a system that works for the needs and constraints of your team.
At 7shifts, our Design system is quite rigid for the website (and currently evolving to sync between our code-base, and Figma files). We've built structures for blog imagery so any content specialist can post without our help, and we're in the process of building out reusable paid ads templates so that we can crank out hundreds of ads in a span of minutes. But creatives on the team still have the flexibility to come up with big concepts on our dedicated marketing campaigns that happen throughout the year. We've found it has helped our team work with more agility and consistently. This work will continue to evolve as our team, tech stack and processes change too!