Design guidelines are a great help to align designers and marketers when creating a project. Design guidelines make sure that research is agreed upon before working on the actual concept. By deciding the strategy and design guidelines in a workshop early in the process, it is possible to avoid conflicts on the long run.
What is Design Guidelines?
Design guidelines can easily be confused with design principles or rules, but design guidelines are meant to give advice on how to use design principles which will turn into design rules for the project. Design guidelines is defined by the Interaction Design Foundation:
“Design guidelines are sets of recommendations towards good practice in design. They are intended to provide clear instructions to designer and developers on how to adopt specific principles.”
Based on this definition, design guidelines can clearly be separated from the concepts design principles and design rules. This gives us three seperate concepts to work with as quoted by Daniël De Wit:
- Design principles are widely applicable laws and considerations. You can use them as a foundation for good design. An example of a principle is ‘educational’.
- Design guidelines tell us how to apply principles. They are recommendations that provide instructions on how to convert principles to rules, like: “Educational tutorials contain well explained visuals”.
- Design rules define the product. They ensure consistency and they can therefore be documented in styleguides or design systems. A good design rule is “Every visual contains a title in Roboto, 64 pixels in size.”
Implement the Design Guidelines
Workshops are a great way to implement the design guidelines for your next design project. Be sure to include all stakeholders and other designer in the workshop. It does not have to take more than an hour if you follow Daniël De Wit’s four steps. First, you introduce the concept behind design guidelines and summarise the research. Second, everyone write design guidelines ideas on sticky notes. Third, you draw a matrix on the whiteboard and everyone put their sticky notes on with an explanation. Then, you pick the most important design guidelines.
What is Next?
The next step is to apply the design guidelines through design rules. Use a styleguide to help you apply it in your design templates, pages, and website. If you need help or have any questions, leave a comment or contact me.
