I’ve always felt that one of the hardest things about working at an agency is when projects come to an end.

After months of working with our clients, learning, empathizing, designing, building, and iterating, we’ve come to care deeply about the team and the product we’re building.

Then suddenly it’s over. Time to say goodbye.

Like all good caretakers we wonder how this thing we’ve nurtured to life will fare once it’s out in the world. Will it be everything we believe it can be? Will it do everything we built it to do?

And maybe more importantly, can it grow and thrive without us? Have we given our client’s team everything they need to take what we delivered to them, and build on it long after we’re gone?

Amidst a global pandemic, Metalab began an ambitious year-long engagement with Upwork, the “world’s work marketplace.”

Upwork wanted to harness the sudden influx of skilled remote workers that had taken to the internet in the wake of the pandemic, and to navigate a strategic shift towards more skilled talent and longer-term engagements.

Initially, our partnership had three objectives. We’d start by articulating an achievable mid-term vision for Upwork. Then we’d give their design system a major overhaul. And finally, we’d begin implementing the vision and the design in their product.

We knew from the start that this would be a substantial undertaking involving multiple verticals and teams within Upwork. We also recognized that our job wasn’t to see the whole thing through to the end, but to lay the groundwork to enable Upwork’s own teams to take ownership and run with it.

To make sure that our impact would reach beyond the work we created, we needed to give Upwork’s teams the tools they’d need to get the job done after we’d left. In short, our fourth objective became to find ways to “arm the rebels.”

Brand guidelines need to be actionable. Unless some designer in the future can use them to create something that captures the underlying spirit of the design, they’re just nice mirages.

If they just pitch a set of ideals that don’t match the work, the result will be forgettable, inconsistent and, most importantly, not all that useful.

To make something that can endure, your guidelines need to document more than the what and the how. They need to capture the spirit of the design — the why.

When Metalab delivers a product, we don’t just deliver the product.

We leave our clients with a comprehensive design system and brand guidelines that are clear enough for everyone who’ll work on the product to understand, and flexible enough to grow with the product.

All this comes with everything you’d expect, like an exhaustive set of feature flows, UI kits, motion examples, journey maps and other behaviour documentation. That’s how we document the what and how.

But how do we document the most important aspect of the design: The why?

Let’s use Upwork’s brand guidelines as an example. To help their designers run with the ball and create consistent and high quality designs, the guidelines connect the fancy and abstract big picture concepts to concrete, tangible examples.

So we built the guidelines in three tiers: 1) principles to focus the design solutions around user needs, 2) applications to maintain consistency across all areas of the product, and 3) examples to use as inspiration and clarity.

A complex document that nobody can remember won’t gain traction, so we created some rules: Be simple. Be memorable. Show them how. If we couldn’t remember the principles in a pop quiz, we went back to the drawing board. Over time, we refined down from five complex sentences down to three imperative statements. These were our top level principles, all centered around supporting the ideal user experience.

Each principle is broken down into five unique applications that support that principle. In addition to zooming in a level, we created these to be used as a checklist of potential approaches that help to achieve a principle. While designers were not required to use all of these applications, they were intended as a toolkit to help create and evaluate new design work.

Finally, each application was illustrated with a variety of real examples that we compiled as we worked with each feature team. What started as a purely text based document soon grew into a gallery of screens and flows that illustrated each of our principles extensively.

How I learned to let go and trust the system

Over the year we spent with Upwork, we built and refined our design principles. As we completed our work with each of the verticals (virtual talent, client onboarding and talent acquisition) we would return to our system, cut things that were no longer true, add things that we learned, and document real product work as examples that would make those principles concrete.

Arming the rebels wasn’t the main focus of our time with Upwork, but the design principles we left them with have played a big part in the company-wide adoption of our work.

Letting go can be hard. You can never know what the future brings, and what exactly will happen to the product after you’re gone. But building real, usable systems that we know our partners can use to go forward certainly helps.

The Problem with Brand Guidelines