Can you be creative within a strict brand guideline?

In short, yes, I think you can be creative within strict brand guidelines. I was faced with redesigning a basic e-commerce platform for collateral fulfillment. The company who brought my team and I in had extremely strict brand guidelines for everything from the color palates we could use to the roundedness of buttons. When I was in school, I had to come up with everything. In a way this was almost freeing as a UX designer because I could focus on the interactions. I have come to love my education; it gave me the ability to step in at any point of a project and help. Having parts pre-defined for me allowed me to take the finite amount of time I have and focus it on the remaining aspects of design.

When we were brought in to redesign Advisor Marketing Central, we did a lot of initial research to understand exactly what AMC "was." the current product was attempting to be an e-commerce platform but was missing key features. The stakeholders we were working with wanted a marketing website. And we realized we could hopefully find something that sat right in-between. I identified key features we could introduce:

  1. Consolidated product pages
  2. A cleaner navigation
  3. A cross-selling section
  4. Brand compliant marketing sections

The current state of the platform

I started by sketching out different concepts and modules we could use to build out the pages. I focused on ways to introduce varying types of content that could be consolidated under different marketing statements. This would allow me to fulfill on the client's desire to introduce their promotional messaging while introducing customers to a variety of related materials to buy.

I would have normally started with very low-fidelity wireframes to build out the page, but because the visual design guidelines were very strict, I was able to create a slightly more visual wireframe very quickly because on the limited options I could use. I was surpsrised at how quickly I could implement a little bit of visual design while focusing on creating the prototypes. It helped lead our conversations on two fronts: We were able to spend the majority of our time making decisions on how to handle interactions and very quickly decide which of the 4 color palates we wanted to use for our final visual design.

After we made our decisions about how we wanted to consolidate product pages and best create curated sections with marketing headlines, we moved towards visual design. We were able to spend most of our time in a semi-visual wireframe stage making decisions because it would only take me a day to add the final visual touches. It helped us iron out details on how the modules would work instead of getting hung up on the right pixel size of the text. Each element was properly skinned by the color palate we picked and the final visuals with interaction notes were delivered to a very happy client.

I was originally really worried about how the visual design was going to come out. I had seen the brand guideline and everything felt very heavy. I had worked with the company before doing some quick touch ups and I did not like the visual designs I had seen. However, I ended getting lost in the interaction design part of the project and forgot about the visual design aspect until we were about to deliver it. After I had applied their style guideline and stepped away from it, I thought it looked pretty nice. Maybe its not such a bad thing to take away one of the worries on a project. We have so many things we are trying to accomplish in every project that maybe this helps keep people focused on what they really find important.