Brand architectures

Organisations arrange their brands in different ways. One company shows a single masterbrand everywhere and gives each division a colour. Another puts its name above every product. A third endorses a brand it bought for a year or two, and a fourth keeps each brand entirely apart. Brand architecture is the name for that arrangement.

Lolly does not ask you which arrangement you have. It gives you a few building blocks, and each arrangement uses them in its own way. This page lists the blocks, then walks through each arrangement: what it looks like, how to set it up in Lolly today, and what Lolly cannot do for it yet. The examples use invented organisations.

The building blocks

Arrangements at a glance

A common way to group arrangements is by how much of the parent brand the audience sees: the parent unifies everything, subsets into tailored businesses, endorses a brand of its own, or detaches from the parent altogether. Three more needs cut across the groups: co-branding, white label, and seasons.

Unify: one brand, many parts

Monolithic

Northwind is one brand. Northwind Freight is teal and Northwind Air is coral, and both use the same logo, type and templates.

• Make one design system for Northwind.
• Give each division a colourway, so a Freight poster and an Air poster use the same templates with a different lead colour. The app around them stays on the canonical colourway.
• Pick the division's colourway per piece in the tool's Design system section, which shows the colourway dots in every tool that draws the lead colour.
• Write each descriptor as text in the template, or add the finished descriptor lockup as a custom mark per division.
• Use house rules to approve the division colours.
• With the export panel's Design system card ticked, an export records the colourway that drew the file, and its description gives the colourway beside the tool, as in Poster (Freight colourway). See The design-system record.

Not yet: the studio cannot author colourways, so a colourway is written into the token file today (the format).

Expanded

Northwind Atlas, Northwind Pulse and Northwind Vault each have a colour and a mark, with Northwind above every product name.

• Keep one design system and give each product a colourway.
• Add a logo identity per product with + Add another logo.
• Use the shared templates for every product.

Not yet: a colourway cannot choose its logo identity, and tools draw the main logo set, so a product's own logo is placed by hand. The masterbrand-above-product lockup is not generated; add a finished one as a custom mark.

Rotating lead colour

Some brands keep their logo, type and layout fixed and change the lead colour from piece to piece, or across a series.

• Make one design system with a colourway for each lead colour. Each colourway carries its own lead, the colour that sits on it, and a partner, in both light and dark.
• Mark one colourway canonical. An artefact that chooses none uses it, and so does the app.
• Pieces that show the whole family at once draw on every lead, canonical first: Chart's series and palettes, Mesh Gradient's shuffle, the Audiogram visualiser's colours and the audio and text covers in Assets. Template authors reach the same leads as --brand-lead-1 onwards (Authoring tools).
• For a series, give each batch row its colourway in the CSV's _themes column. Each row renders in its own colourway, and so does a tool placed inside it, such as a QR code. A saved session keeps its colourway in multi-edit, in a batch and in a Design document export.
• Verify reads back which colourway drew each piece, from the record an export carries while its Design system card is ticked.

Not yet: no series, batch or copy flow picks colourways by a rule, and the batch grid has no control for a row's colourway. The engine's rules (cycle, by key, shuffle, by date) exist for scripts; see Colourways.

Subset: a parent with tailored businesses

Driven

Halcyon shows its own logo with each business's name, and each business tailors the material to its audience.

• Use one design system and write the business name as text, when the businesses share everything else.
• Or make a design system per business, when each business needs its own material: export the parent's brand pack and bring it in again for each business (Move a brand between devices).

Not yet: a copy does not stay linked to the parent, so a change to the parent does not reach the businesses. Tailoring by audience beyond colour is not built.

Endorse: the parent stands behind a brand of its own

Appended

Ferro keeps its own mark and adds "by Halcyon" for its first two years after the acquisition.

• Make a design system for Ferro.
• Add the finished endorsed lockup as a custom mark.
• Publish a version while the endorsement runs. A link that pins the version with designv keeps drawing the endorsed lockup after the endorsement ends.
• An export drawn from a published version records that version, and Recreate with these settings in Verify reopens the tool in the same version.

Not yet: Lolly does not generate an endorsement lockup from the two marks, and a design system cannot carry the date an endorsement ends.

Apparent

Halcyon Tidal and Halcyon Bloom have distinct marks and colours but share type, grid and motion, and the parent is well known without being shown.

• Make the shared start once, export its brand pack, and bring the pack in again as each brand's own design system.

Not yet: copies drift apart. Nothing keeps the shared type, grid and motion in step across the brands.

Detach: brands that stand alone

Shadow

Brands that are related behind the scenes but each define themselves for their audience.

• Make a design system per brand. Lolly keeps each one's tokens, fonts, logos and versions apart.

Not yet: Lolly does not record that the brands are related.

Discrete

Brands with no visible relationship at all, often worked on by the same people.

• Make a design system per brand on the same device and switch per job in Settings → Design systems.
• One active design system applies to the whole device. A link that carries ds= switches the device to that design system.
• A Lolly workspace supplies one design system to everyone who joins it, so each brand that needs a workspace has its own.

Not yet: an artefact does not own its design system, so two brands cannot be open side by side, and a workspace cannot supply a different design system to different groups of people.

Across the groups

Co-branding

A sponsor's or partner's mark on your event poster.

• Place the partner's logo as an image in Design.
• Record where the logo came from and its licence with creative rights.

Not yet: Lolly does not hold the partner's rules (clear space, minimum size, allowed treatments), and the partner's mark is not a design system of its own inside the artwork.

White label

One set of assets re-skinned for each client, where no client may see another client's name or mark.

• Make a design system per client and switch per job.
• Give each client their own brand pack, or the artefacts made in their design system.
• Check what an export says about how it was made before you send the file. See Exporting.
• An export from a tool records the name of the client's design system. The export panel's Design system card shows that name before the file is written; untick the card when a file must not carry the name. Batch and folder exports show no card, so their files carry no name.

Not yet: nothing keeps one client's material out of another client's work automatically. Switching is by hand.

Seasons and campaigns

A holiday skin, a launch, a yearly conference theme: an overlay on the core for a set time.

• Declare a theme group of kind campaign in the token file, with a date window on each option (the format).
• Choose the campaign per artefact from the list in the tool's Design system section, in every tool the campaign changes.
• Publish a version to keep a record of the design system as it was.
• An export records the campaign option that drew the file, as it records a colourway.

Not yet: nothing applies the window to new work or schedules a campaign.

A colourway, a logo identity, or a design system of its own

Choose the smallest block that holds the difference.

1. Only the colour differs: a colourway.
2. The colour differs and the part has its own logo: a colourway and a logo identity in the same design system.
3. The part has its own assets, its own tools or its own rules: a design system of its own.

A part can move down this list as it grows. Moving down means copying material into a new design system; Lolly does not move it for you.

Where to go next

• Token workflows: the colourway format and how a colourway is chosen.
• The Brand Studio: logos, colours, versions and copies.
• Design Tokens: the token model every design system is written in.