Make It Sticky, Not Pretty

Create style guides that provoke action

Maira Kalman’s mother’s closet is pictured above. Kalman also happens to have illustrated the most recent edition of Strunk and White’s “Elements of Style” — the goto Style Guide for every great writer.

Shortly after college I used to moonlight as a consultant for various user interface design projects. Once when I explained my side gig as a consultant to a friend, he asked if I was helping to organize closets. “Consultant” is a pretty general title and is often associated with high fees in return for a value that’s opaque at best. The concept is open to misunderstanding and derision. The most important thing that all consultants do by definition is bring an outside perspective. For many clients and organizations, this would be impossible to get otherwise.

We almost always meet an organization or client at the brink of extreme change. Whether they’re about to take stock of all the objects that they own or are rethinking their entire communication strategy, clients come to consultants for their domain expertise and experience. The point of hiring an outside consultant is to use them to increase the value of a particular internal team or type of work to the organization. Often this is through building something together. When successful, the transformation that an organization undergoes has lasting consequences.

…buyers of transformations seek to be guided toward some specific aim or purpose, and transformations must elicit that intended effect. That’s why we call such buyers aspirants — they aspire to be some one of some _thing_ different. With transformations, _the customer is the product!_ The individual buyer of the transformation essentially says, “Change me.”
—Pine & Gilmore

Within design, style guides are often an afterthought. They’re confined to the dry language of standards and manuals that no one wants to read. At best, style guides are shipped as UI toolkits and conversational websites with unique navigations. While all this experimentation in implementation helps developers build front-end design faster, consistency still pulls the focus. A UI toolkit does not help an organization make better design decisions. The focus on implementation also over emphasizes style-guides-as-deliverables. The style guide stands in for the design process itself and fails as a tool for future decision-making.

At Mule, our style guides help our clients make decisions without us.

At Mule, our style guides help our clients make decisions without us. Here’s an example of how we’ve explained the value of our style guide to a client:

A design project is a series of decisions that culminates in a coherent — yet dynamic — design system that lays the foundation to support the growth and progress of your organization over time. Mule Design collaborated closely with the [client team] to build the [client’s website and design system] based on insights gained through internal and external research. This style guide documents the design decisions made in that process.

We can’t exactly predict what will happen the next six months or five years. Throughout the design process, we left space for the unknown and for what’s to come. The design system put in place will grow with your organization.

The [client organization’s website] is a communication tool. Its launch is a hypothesis put to the world. This guide will help you make great design decisions going forward.

Shifting organizations to this point-of-view is the easy part. Shifting designers who feel invested in the aesthetics of style-guides-as-artifact is difficult. Design firms and designers get caught up in the aesthetics of the guide itself.

Because there’s this convention to produce a beautiful document even though you know it’ll be ignored, we at Mule are still exploring ways to create useful and effective documentation for people who might at first find it unsatisfying. We’ve made wikis, websites, PDFs, and keynote presentations to get our point across. In every case we make sure the medium supports our goals.

Style guides that only stand-in for a process are intangible. A focus on aesthetics and showing how hard the designers worked on a sleek style guide overrides its potential utility. You need something that provokes action, not something to be admired. Go forth and do something different!