Design systems in digital magazines
How to design in an organized way to reduce development time and increase engagement.
3 mins read
Biases
As a developer, I have often suffered from a kind of design bias: You can develop innovative software that does amazing things and is error-free, but if the visual part is ugly and difficult to use, you're going to have a very hard time selling it.
For that reason, design is one of the most important parts of a website, especially if we are offering content that is usually consumed in moments of leisure and enjoyment.
Organization
A good organization of the design is crucial for the proper implementation of the rest of the strategies and the development of the system. Therefore, the first thing we need to have is a corporate identity and a design system.
With corporate identity, we ensure the following benefits:
- Brand consistency and authenticity
- Proper application
- Uniformity
With these elements, what we generate in the user is a perception of quality, which impacts on authority and trust. Additionally, we make our publications more easily recognizable across any platforms and formats where they are published (web, Instagram, Advertising Banners, etc).
Benefits of a design system
With a design system, in addition to the aforementioned, we also obtain the following benefits:
- Reduction of design time, as there is no need to create designs from scratch, but rather by using predefined components.
- Faster identification of design improvement opportunities.
- Implementation of improvements across the entire system.
Real case and practical example:
A few years ago, we launched a daily newsletter and podcast, and we have managed to significantly increase the number of subscribers to both the newsletter and the podcast, far more than the number of paid subscribers.
Unfortunately, since we did not use a design system and evolved in parallel, our newsletter and our podcasts do not look anything alike, and except for the logo, they have a completely different appearance from the main design of our website.
We have detected that the majority of newsletter subscribers are not aware of the podcast, and likewise, the majority of podcast listeners are not aware of the newsletter. The vast majority of them are also not paying subscribers.
What to do in such a case?
Let's skip the content planning discussed at the beginning of the article, which would take care of:
- Boost the consumption of content across different areas.
- Do not overwhelm the reader with too much content, so they never feel the need to pay for a subscription.
In this case, we are solely focused on the design. Our goal is for all content from any area to be identifiable. That is, if a newsletter subscriber suddenly sees a podcast from our outlet, they should be able to quickly recognize it, and vice versa.
We will also plan the new design, taking into account the main website. In this way, any of the newsletter or podcast consumers will also quickly recognize our website.
Once the strategy is implemented, we can iterate over the design system, measure results, and quickly apply corrections for podcasts, web, newsletters, e-commerce, etc.