Case Study

Building a design guideline for Chain Valley

When I first onboarded into Chain Valley, the company lacked a design guideline. This motivated me to come up with a system that would help the company design content with consistent visual appeal, which eventually gave the company its own unique aura or brand image.

Link to Instagram page

Why did Chain Valley require a design guideline?

Prior to building a design guideline, Chain Valley had inconsistent visual appeal. We wanted to build visual consistency to help weave a consistent narrative that could resonate deeply with our followers. It would also later help users identify Chain Valley’s content at first glance.

Before

What were the requirements?

- Consistent fonts (style and size)
- Consistent colours and photo edits
- Consistent icons and spacings
- Consistent visual elements

Consistent fonts -

Style and size

A combination of two sans-serif and one serif typeface. 

Montserrat: geometric sans-serif typeface
Roboto: neo-grotesque sans-serif typeface family
PT Serif: pan-Cyrillic font family

Font size were relative to information hierarchy.

Headline: 120 px + 80px
Subhead: 50px
Body: 35px

Consistent colours & photo edits

I chose primary and secondary colors to be consistent to the brand’s image and logo.
Blue and yellow were chosen as it resonates with our company goal, which is to give off a playful yet important message. Also, by doing so we stood out from our competitors.

While photo edits were also chosen to remain consistent for visual coherence.

Consistent icons and spacing

Selecting icons to create consistency across all posts was critical to create coherence.

I created a system to maintain consistent spacings so that all Chain Valley content would receive proper digestibility of content and improve readability.

Consistent visual elements -

such as underlines and circles

Maintaining a consistent pattern of visual elements also helped in creating coherence and provided a strong brand image.