In today’s fast-moving digital landscape, businesses need more than just good design—they need systems that can evolve, scale, and adapt across different markets and brands. Enter the Primary Design System (PDS). At its core, a PDS is a set of reusable components, rules, and standards designed to work seamlessly across websites, digital tools, or even entire brands. Unlike traditional design systems, Primary Design Systems are unbranded and un-opinionated. This means they can power multiple branded experiences without locking you into a single look or style.
Think of it as the foundation: sturdy, consistent, and flexible enough to allow you to build unique brand experiences while maintaining efficiency and governance.
Why Use a Primary Design System?
Imagine you manage a multinational company with 20 different brands, each operating in 30 markets and speaking 30 languages. Your marketing teams need to adapt content and messaging for local audiences while maintaining brand consistency. Meanwhile, your tech team needs a single platform that can serve all markets without having to reinvent the wheel for every brand or market-specific change.
A traditional Design System can support a single brand across regions and languages, but when you multiply that by 20 brands, you’re looking at maintaining 20 different systems. This is where a Primary Design System steps in—it’s unbranded, allowing you to use the same system across all your brands. Each brand can then have its specific visual elements like logos, typography, and colour schemes configured through a single platform, without altering the core code. The result? One system, one point of maintenance, endless possibilities.
What’s the Difference Between Guides and Systems?
Guides and systems both have their place in design, but they serve different purposes. A style guide, often called a brand book or playbook, offers general principles and room for interpretation. It’s flexible but requires custom development each time it’s applied, limiting its scalability and consistency.
A system, on the other hand, is rule-driven. It provides a predictable set of components that work the same way every time they’re used, no matter where or how they’re applied. This consistency allows for infinite creative flexibility while maintaining reliability, making it easier for teams to focus on what matters—crafting great user experiences.
Why You Need a Primary Design System
A well-executed Primary Design System can help you meet both customer needs and commercial goals, all while keeping your brand and user experience consistent. Here’s how:
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Faster Time to Market: If you need to launch 20 websites in 10 languages, a PDS allows you to reuse components, cutting down development time and enabling you to reach your customers faster.
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Empower Marketing Teams: With a PDS, non-technical team members can publish content, run A/B tests, and make updates without relying on developers, allowing for more agile marketing strategies.
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Broaden Your Reach: Whether expanding into new markets or improving accessibility, a PDS ensures that your brand experience remains consistent while adapting to local needs, languages, and regulations.
Putting Customers First
At the heart of any marketplace are people looking for value. To deliver that, your Primary Design System must be built with a deep understanding of your audience. It’s not just about what looks good; it’s about how well the system serves the people engaging with it. If the system feels too generic or impersonal, customers will quickly disengage.
A great PDS starts with fundamental questions like:
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Who is our audience?
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What value do they gain by interacting with us?
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How can we deliver the best user experience possible?
Without these considerations, even the most technically perfect system risks delivering cookie-cutter experiences that miss the mark.
Building and Documenting a Primary Design System
Creating a successful PDS starts with clear documentation. At Coherence, we begin by auditing your content and establishing design patterns, branding environments, and global system behaviours. We then document everything in a Functional Design Specification (FDS) —a blueprint that guides designers and developers alike.
This document covers essential details like:
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Design patterns
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Branding environments (colour palettes, typography)
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Grid systems and responsive behaviours
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Component configuration options
More importantly, it outlines practical use cases for each design pattern and explains how they can be used in real-world scenarios. It’s a road map that gives designers freedom while ensuring consistency across every brand instance.
Implementing and Using Primary Design Systems
While the FDS is technology-agnostic, the Primary Design System itself isn’t. It needs to be implemented on a front-end platform, such as Acquia Site Studio with Drupal, or on other platforms like React or Swift depending on your needs. Ensuring your system can operate across multiple technologies is critical for maintaining consistency. But even the most advanced system is useless if it’s too complex for non-technical users. That’s why we ensure our Primary Design Systems are easy to use for marketers, content developers, and designers alike. With intuitive, drag-and-drop interfaces, even those without coding experience can assemble or modify pages with ease.
Finding the Right Balance
The key to a successful PDS lies in balance. You want a system that covers all use cases without overwhelming users with too many highly specialised components. On the flip side, having too few components with overly complex configurations can reduce usability. Striking that balance ensures that your team can leverage the system to engage customers without frustration.
In conclusion, a Primary Design System gives you the flexibility to scale, adapt, and experiment while maintaining consistency and control. It frees your teams to focus on what really matters—delivering great experiences to your customers, no matter the market, language, or brand.
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