Think about today’s most recognizable brands. From the colors and fonts they use to the images that appear alongside brand messaging, these brands are visually represented consistently across all of their products, experiences and marketing. Each of those companies likely has a visual design language in place to guide how internal and external teams use brand elements in the work they create.

What is a Design Language?

A design language is a communication framework made up of reusable components including colors, fonts, icons and images. This system is used to ensure consistency across a brand’s online experience, on packaging, marketing materials, and anywhere that brand’s visual identity appears.

Design Language vs. Style Guide: What’s the Difference? 
A design language is the framework designers use to create a brand’s product and experience. Typically made up of components like icons, logos, colors and fonts, a design language is the core of a larger design system that helps design teams structure work.

But a brand style guide is a set of guidelines that clearly communicate how to use each element of a brand’s design language to ensure consistency and empower teams to create at scale.

Elements of a Design Language

Design languages generally share some common elements, including:

• Visual elements, like icons and logos
• User interface components and patterns
• Brand colors and color palettes
• Fonts and type styles

Why Do You Need a Design Language?

Design languages are essential to building a brand’s visual identity. Having a design language helps increase consistency, improve clarity, and empowers teams to create efficiently.

1. Brand Consistency
   A design language ensures your brand is always displayed consistently anywhere it appears. It’s critical that all elements of your brand’s experience, both online and offline, share the same brand design language, which helps enhance brand recognition among your users.
2. Clarity
   Using a design language creates clarity in communication when it comes to your brand image. This applies both internally and externally. It helps your internal teams align on what your brand represents and what its values are and, externally, it helps ensure that your brand message and values are easily understood through every touchpoint.
3. Efficiency
   An established design language and accompanying guidelines make it easy for designers to create experiences that are always on-brand. They don’t need to worry about small things like color application, font styles, or layout because they have a guide in place. This gives them more time to focus on the bigger picture of what they are creating.

Building a Design Language with Lingo

It’s easier than ever to build and manage your design language with Lingo. Let’s dive right in.

Drag. Drop. Done.

The ability to fully customize how your design language is displayed is one of the greatest benefits of using Lingo. You can also add notes directly alongside assets to convey context and guidance for use to anyone pulling from your design language, making it easier to scale consistency.