A central design system is the most common practice for ensuring content quality and consistency As our results have shown, one of the ways companies are meeting the Figure 15: What type of guidelines do you have for ensuring demand for content is to set up more content creation centers within the creation of consistent, high quality content? business. While this makes it easier to produce more content, it also makes it harder to ensure consistency and quality of the content. While different We have a central design system that content-producing centers may have unique goals or audiences, it’s important ensures editorial, brand and visual quality for them to all share the same brand identity, and match the look and feel for and consistency across all teams, and it is 26% all the content being produced by the same company. digitally accessible in our content platforms A design system is a complete set of rules, guidelines and assets made We have a central design system that available to all content creators within a company. They dictate editorial ensures editorial, brand and visual quality 30% criteria, key visual elements, brand identity and production processes and consistency across all teams for all content. While the majority of companies (30%) have such a design system hard We have guidelines for editorial criteria 20% coded, the more mature ones (26%) have it uploaded into all content-creating and brand/visual representation platforms. Practically, this may look like pre-loaded pictures or video or key messaging and copy that is readily accessible within digital platforms, but We have guidelines for brand 19% companies can expand this to include many more elements. and visual presentation Banking (35%), manufacturing (35%) and technology (29%) industries were We do not have set guidelines the most mature verticals, with the majority of respondents using a central for creating content 5% design system that was digitally accessible on all content creation platforms. SOURCE: Altimeter “The 2021 State of Digital Content” n= 375 23