A diagram system for four brands

Product workflow diagrams were being drawn from scratch by whoever needed one, in whatever tool they had, in whatever colours came out of the box. Across four brands, in decks that went to customers.

The brief was one line: “Create branded Visio stencils for each brand.” Followed, from the requester, by: “not sure what Visio is? Do you know?”

I didn't have the software and had never used it. It turned out not to be an application at all in our environment but an add-in, which took a while to establish.

The harder constraint was who would use it. The people drawing these diagrams were product marketing managers, not designers. A system they had to interpret would be ignored; a system they could drag from would be used.

I built tokens before I built diagrams. Page one of each template is a specification: brand hex values, connector styles, the brand arrow, the icon circle background, the dark background, plus stroke weights and type sizes. Anyone opening the file sees the rules before the assets.

I drew each icon once and released it in four colourways rather than drawing four sets. Six named sets — Process Automation, Technology, Tech Devices, Business Essentials, Sports, Social Media — in a shared white plus a per-brand colour, with written guidance on pairing white icons with each brand's circle.

I shipped light and dark from the start. The workflow diagrams exist in both, as editable source and as finished PDF, because half of them were going into slide decks and half onto the website.

And I audited my own work and said so. Partway through, I found the first round had missed the brand colours:

“The light version has branding updates that were missed on my part during the initial designs… I figured out how to insert the hex colors so none of these diagrams should be using default orange and blacks from Visio anymore.”

Project thread · December 2021
Retrofitting tokens across the whole set was several days of unglamorous work that nobody had asked for and nobody would have noticed. It is the difference between a set of files and a system.

Three branded templates — Vizrt, NewTek and NDI — each opening on its own token page.
Six icon sets in four brand colourways, plus product icons in light and dark, product logos and component logos.
The workflow diagram set in light and dark, as editable source and as finished PDF — live production, automation, graphics, newsroom, playout, XR and more.
Its own documentation. A Visio Resources Overview listing the contents, stating the usage rules, and linking every file to the company brand hub.

A product marketing lead broke the dark-variant work into subtasks himself and announced completion to four PMMs — the system was being run by its users, not by me.

Fifteen months later it was still the standard. In January 2023 I was still maintaining the template in the company brand hub: adding social icons, adding Flowics, Viz Pilot Edge, Viz Now and Viz AI, retiring end-of-life logos — the request arriving as “both teal and white pls,” which is what it sounds like when a design system has become infrastructure.