How Frontify helped Datacom centralize its design system and brand identity

Datacom, a forward-thinking tech company, sought to unify its evolving brand. The team wanted to empower employees to use brand assets consistently across different channels and regions as they rolled out a brand refresh. Frontify helped Datacom create a central hub for its new branding. This hub is helping nurture a strong brand identity that is consistent everywhere.

Datacom uses Frontify since 2020

Brand Guidelines

Digital Asset Management

Creative Collaboration

A decentralization dilemma

Datacom, an IT solutions provider, is one of Australasia’s leading locally-owned technology businesses, with more than 6,500 employees and $1.49 billion in revenue. The company recently went through a brand refresh, which they initiated to help grow Datacom’s reputation as a leader and disruptor in the Australasia tech industry. With this structural overhaul came the need for visual upgrades to the brand.

With so many employees in the company, Datacom needed help keeping its visual identity consistent across regions, departments, and channels. The problem? Decentralized brand assets. Different departments were using different versions of documents and resources, making version control hard to manage. Plus, if anyone in the company needed the logo or other visual assets, they had to send an email to request it, which didn’t scale well.

Datacom’s team sought a more efficient and user-friendly way to manage their branded assets and design workflow.

Enter Frontify.

A streamlined solution

Frontify gave Datacom a complete solution to its brand management and inconsistency challenges with a brand portal and design system.

One Stop For Brand Assets and Guidelines

Frontify’s brand management platform centralizes Datacom’s brand, acting as the single source of truth for over 45,000 brand-related assets and guidelines for all users in the company. Since launching Frontify, Datacom’s team has eliminated version control issues and the need for one-off email requests for visual assets across the company.

“Frontify has enabled us to create and centralize brand guidelines and supporting resources, ensuring anyone at Datacom, as well as our partners and agencies, have access to the correct and approved brand assets in just a few clicks.”

Kirsty Brown

Senior Brand Manager

An Integrated Design System

Frontify helped bolster Datacom’s Endeavour Design System, a collection of reusable design components, brand guidelines, and open-source code. Frontify’s integrations, with Figma and Storybook, allow Datacom to effectively showcase what the design system has to offer employees in the form of visual guidelines and documentation.

“The integrations that Frontify enables with our ecosystem of design system tools allow us to effectively showcase what the design system has to offer. It has given us the platform to create visual guidelines and documentation for our components using design examples directly from our Figma design kit and live component demos from Storybook, which are critical foundations of our design system.”

Kirsty Brown

Senior UX/UI Designer

Seamless Internal Communication

Datacom also integrated Frontify into its internal communication channels and onboarding processes, ensuring widespread engagement and awareness of the brand among all employees. By consolidating and aligning internal communication, Frontify’s brand portal continues to be the singular platform for brand resources at Datacom. It's easily accessible and linked from several internal platforms, including the intranet and different communication channels. This increase in accessibility also drove an increase in usage — Datacom measured over 720K brand-approved asset downloads over the last 12 months (as of December 2023) conducted by its over 4.2K unique visitors. From this, more than 440K assets were used externally.

Essentially, all roads lead users to Frontify.

A robust result

Frontify’s implementation resulted in significant improvements within Datacom.

“Frontify has really helped us streamline and centralize our brand resources. This change has boosted efficiency and consistency and enabled more self-service across our user base. It has also enabled easy, anytime access for our widespread, distributed teams.”

Kirsty Brown

Senior Brand Manager

Time savings and better efficiency: Datacom employees can now access all brand resources without delay and no longer have to search for resources and wait for approvals. In fact, people save 3 to 5 hours per request waiting for approvals.
Agency collaboration: Between 1-2 hours of admin time is saved with agencies per project and brand application by agencies has improved by an estimated 60%.
Improved brand consistency: The platform improved brand consistency for Datacom by an estimated 50% in 2023 by creating a standard brand experience across all departments and regions.
Accessibility: Frontify enabled Datacom to increase brand-approved asset access by an estimated 80% in 2023. Everyone at Datacom now has access to Frontify with all the Masterbrand assets, tools, and guidelines. Because these assets are so accessible, Datacom has seen a 17% increase in total active users and a 23% uptick in asset page views over that same period.
Empowerment and self-service capabilities: With Frontify, Datacom was able to increase employee self-service by an estimated 40%, as well as design output in 2023. Frontify’s brand portal enables all employees — even non-designers — to own brand management through easy customization while maintaining brand consistency.

Overall, Frontify helped Datacom successfully navigate its brand refresh and improve consistency, promoting strong brand cohesion and design alignment.

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