Section Title
Design pillars
The Interface Design pillars provide creative guidance, ensuring the application of our design language to create on-brand communications and experiences. From product launch campaigns to trade-show exhibition graphics, the design pillars should act as the benchmark to measure all creative against. They should be adopted, understood and encouraged equally by creative and non-creative teams alike. The design pillars will become particularly useful when working with external agencies, suppliers and other design collaborators.
Understanding the design pillars
As a brand we have four distinct design pillars to measure all creative against. For visual reference of how these pillars can be applied, refer to the Brand showcase section.
Purposeful
Our design language is built on a desire to be elegantly reductive. Inspired by a sense of modernism, we should strive to do less but design better. Our design language promotes stripping away decoration for the sake of it, instead adopting a confidence in functional, objective design. Influenced by the International Typographic Style, our design language applies rigour to the use of asymmetrical layouts, clear use of grids, and our sans-serif typeface, Akzidenz Grotesk. Adopting this reductive and ordered approach to design ultimately helps to support and elevate our product. But this approach not only applies to how we visually communicate as a brand, but how we can act more responsibly in what we create.
Considerations:
- Ask, is this design serving its purpose?
- Does this design communicate a sense of reductiveness, free from unnecessary decoration?
- Can we simplify a design to clarify meaning and understanding of an idea?
- Think broadly, how can we use creative and assets more effectively, sharing across more of the business?
- Build this kind of reductive thinking into the creative response at the beginning of the process.
Modular
As with our flooring products, our design language is underpinned by a modular grid system. These grids help to establish a sense of order to our communications. They give form to the built spaces we create to experience our product. Modular systems can also be applied to how we structure our UI, UX, and other interactive digital experiences. However, the grid shouldn’t ever hinder our creative expression. It serves to guide, but not dictate.
Considerations:
- Creative can make use of a visible grid structure, using modular panels to house graphics, imagery and other content.
- Typography can align and cross-align to create more sophisticated executions.
- However, the grid can also play more of an invisible role, helping to anchor type and graphics on full-bleed creative.
- Much in the same way, the modular grid system should underpin the design of our physical structures.
- UI components and other digital experiences should also be designed to be reusable or adaptable, helping to simplify and improve the user experience.
- Similarly, how we conceptualise and produce our creative assets should be planned with a view to easily sharing and repurposing across multiple formats and channels.
Emotive
Our brand essence is to Move People through Life Changing Design. This foundational statement is the distillation of the Interface brand into a core idea. Put simply, our modular flooring physically moves people throughout a space. But on a deeper level, we strive to emotionally move and inspire people to care about the world we live in.
Although our design language is built on solid design-system thinking, this should not be at the expense of communicating with warmth and personality. This should be evident in all our creative decisions. Does our creative make the viewer feel something - to move them? From the campaigns that launch our product, the built spaces used to experience our product, right down to how to shoot our staff portraits.
This also applies to how we verbalise our brand through language and tone-of-voice. For more information on this, refer to the Tone of Voice section.
Considerations
- Question the intentions of the creative and what we want the viewer to feel?
- Understand the audience and the subject matter being communicated.
- Should the creative feel reductive and functional, sophisticated or have a sense of warmth?
- Consider the delivery mechanism or channel being used to deliver the content.
- Is there a way to further the emotional pull of the content through technology or alternative storytelling techniques?
Progressive
We design with innovation front-of-mind in everything we do - from the products we create, to the services and initiatives we build for the greater good. This desire to be progressive should be harnessed as a tool. Enabling us to engage with our customers and business peers on a deeper level. We should be seen as being progressive in both the choice of stories we tell, and the mediums we use to tell them.
Considerations:
- How can we make our content richer through innovative storytelling techniques?
- Can film and animation be used to tell design stories through more relevant means?
- Could interactive technologies be used to make the experience of our product more sensory?
- How does architecture play a role in the customers experience of our product in the built environment?
- Can we harness new, alternative or recycled materials to help in the presentation of our products in the built environment?
From product launch campaigns to trade-show exhibition graphics, the design pillars should act as the benchmark to measure all creative against.