How to Use Design Systems to Scale Event Design

Amy Barone, Sr. Director of Marketing Events & Engagement Programs at Tableau Software, shares her event marketing secrets in our A New Era in Event Marketing webinar with Harvard Business Review and AdAge. Below, she gives an inside look at how Tableau  grew and scaled a high-performance event program.

As a designer, it's easy to get caught between your creative process, and your deadlines. You identify the problem, devise the solution, and iterate. It's not always efficient, but you plow ahead anyway.

When we first started Splash Creative — design services for our customers — it was challenging to marry the creative process with tight timelines. The event industry moves fast — and we had to make sure we were moving just as fast, without sacrificing our creativity.

Today, I lead a team of 13 designers who create around 2,700 event templates on Splash a year (on top of onboarding 80 customers a month). The secret?

Start thinking about design systems. Here's how:

Ten years later, our annual conference attracts nearly 20,000 customers and partners, our company has grown to 4,000 people, and we have a first-class marketing team with dedicated event professionals who are the best in the biz. Events have been a crucial part of our brand and help us better connect with our community, evangelize our customers, and ultimately grow our company.

Here’s how we did it:

It’s difficult to scale without knowing what you need. Putting a number on how many events your company hosts is a good starting point, but if you want to maximize your efforts, you have to get specific. 

Is your event public or private? Exclusive to VIPs or open to a general audience? Ticketed or RSVP? What event promotions or emails will you need?

This is important because things will differ based one each use case. If you know this year that you will have to design event pages for happy hours, a conference, and a gala, you will also need know the details for each. Happy hours aren’t always public-facing and conferences usually have more content blocks than other types, but what about everything else?

How we do it at Splash: We document exactly what we know about each use case (event types, promotions, etc.) and compile fact sheets containing everything we know and everything we’ll need.

Image: Penguin Random House

The last thing you should do is create hundreds of custom anything.

Once you’ve identified the assets needed for each event type, the next step is creating assets your team can repurpose. Think Play-Doh masquerading as content blocks.

In other words: avoid one-offs. Build assets with double or triple duty potential whenever possible. When you get it right, your team’s assets should cover 80-90% of your event use cases. The use cases your assets can’t cover are also important — and I’ll explain why later on.

How we do it at Splash: Using blocks and containers with broad applicability means the difference between designing an event card from scratch and modifying an existing event card within minutes. 

Image: Conference Matters

You can’t scale event design in isolation. Whether you're using automation software or storing files in the cloud, sharing newly created assets with every member of your team is crucial to scaling.

Whatever sharing system you choose, don’t leave assets stranded on the island of your computer. The real beauty of sharing the wealth is empowering others to execute on your vision.

And it’s not just about making sure these assets are available, but that they’re organized, too. To truly reduce friction, keep your team’s favorite assets in a central, logical location so everyone knows where they live. Then make sure everyone uses it.

How we do it at Splash: Every time someone creates and saves a block via Splash, it’s automatically added to everyone’s shared-block library. If someone needs a block, they don’t have to create one or waste time finding the owner. They just remix the existing block.

Image: Google Books

Things that don’t work don’t scale. When designing your events, each touchpoint should not only be on brand, but it must also deliver the same experience on desktop, mobile, and tablet.

That’s why nothing leaves our team without scalability and brand consistency checks.

How we do it at Splash: When our team builds a block on desktop, we also check it on mobile and tablet, repeating the check for every block made. When we're done, there’s an entire template QA'd for brand and function across devices. 

Image: designworkplan

You’re probably thinking: I understand why we need systems, but how can I maintain uniqueness and personalization for each event? How do I make sure they don’t start to look like the same thing over and over again?

You may fantasize about meeting every use case when building your inventory of assets but the truth is, you won’t. Not all assets will meet Play-Doh criteria and it’s near impossible to account for each one.

So, when you’ve got your system in place and something unexpected comes up. What do you do?

This is where the magic happens — you break the grid. You face the charge of making something new. You move away from tasks and start solving new problems. That's when creativity begins.

At the end of the day, throwing events mean nothing if you’re not providing value to your customers.

At our conferences, we provide “Tableau Doctors” on-site that help customers or prospects with any questions about our product. Not only do these one-on-one appointments empower customers to engage with us in a meaningful way, they’ve also been the critical to driving event ROI.