If you’re a designer you know how challenging it can be to distribute a unified design language to your entire team while also ensuring that design language is always up to date. We’ve seen some of Lingo’s customers use asset references to make this task easier. Because of this I wanted to share how you too can use asset references to ensure consistency at scale.

Let’s first start by reviewing what asset references are and how they can be created. Asset references enable users to create multiple instances of the same asset inside Lingo. When the master reference is updated so are all the references or instances of the asset.

To create an asset reference simply copy the asset you want to reference and paste it in the desired kit. You can also create a reference by option dragging the asset you want to reference into another kit in the navigator. Keep in mind asset references have to live in a separate kit from the master reference. Asset references are marked with an arrow in the upper left corner of the asset cell. Furthermore clicking on the arrow will navigate you back to the master reference.

Now that you know how to create an asset reference, lets go over a scenario in which they’re useful for scaling your design language. Let’s say you want to ensure all of your design team is using the correct most up to date components so you’re using Lingo’s Sketch plugin to sync all your Sketch components, everything from your layer styles, buttons, colors and icons to Lingo. You then give all of the members on your design team access to this kit.

You also realize you want to empower your marketing and sales teams by giving them access to the product’s design language so they can create presentation materials on their own. They only need access to a small portion of the language however, just the icons and colors. To do this you could sync just the icons and colors to a separate kit for the marketing and sales team, but this would be inefficient. You’d have the same assets in two different kits but those assets wouldn’t be connected to one another. When updating, you’d have to remember to update the assets in both kits. This creates complexity and increases the risk of inconsistencies!

Fortunately this problem can be solved with asset references. You can simply copy the icons and colors from the master kit and paste them into the marketing and sales kit -thus creating asset references. Then when updating these assets you only need to update the master kit — those changes will then automatically propagate out to the asset references in the marketing and sales kit.

So as you can see asset references can be a powerful tool that allows you to distribute the same assets in different kits to different people while only having to update those assets in one location, thus reducing the risk of inconsistencies.