Amazon Brand Portal
2017
As a whole, Amazon is a motley crew of smaller companies with diverse customer segments and brand standards. Without a centralized hub for brand guidance, brand owners (before 2018) had to track down assets, guidelines, Q&As, and points of contact through various channels, emails, and file sharing. It was an inefficient and confusing process that led to inconsistency and poor judgments.
Version control was a nightmare when brand owners and partners relied on email file attachments, which led to the spread of outdated content.
A centralized hub for brand guidelines is needed to alleviate the frustrations and to give all brand marketers and designers a trusted source of truth and one-stop brand management.
Each Amazon brand operates in a different customer market at a different pace of growth. Therefore, the brand guidelines are at various stages of brand maturity and needs. The image above shows the table of contents from two brand guidelines (PDFs) to illustrate the content gaps between brands and how each brand structured its content differently. The brand portal design has to be a flexible workhorse that can work well with various states of long-form content.
The combination of top and side navigations is the ideal structure to house the different depths of content needed across brands. Most brand guidelines can be parsed into three top-nav categories while fitting high-level information into the home landing page. The site can comfortably have up to six top navigation links.
The side-nav can display three tiers of navigational links. The first and second-tier links are links to pages and sub-pages, and the third-tier links are anchor links within the page. Since all brand guidelines are built differently, only some brands need all three levels of navigation. This exercise examines which side-nav systems look and work best for the different brands and portal users.
After the title, the content on the site should lead with an image. Suppose future iteration of the site ever becomes mobile-first. In that case, this design tenet is especially useful to help readers absorb the content better when the guideline is led with an image before a variable body copy length. Since all the pre-existing brand guidelines (PDFs) are built differently, this content reconstruction for consistency is required but pretty straightforward.
This exercise examines which side of the page the long-form body should be situated on. While most people are accustomed to a left-aligned body because the content is neatly tucked together, having right-side content offsetting with the left-aligned headlines has its benefits. It is consistent with the above-mentioned design tenet – show it before discussing it. More importantly, scanning for blocks of information and earmark labels becomes more effortless since it utilizes negative space to break up large bodies of content.
The brand portal is designed to be a workhorse that democratizes design, making it accessible to all Amazon brand owners. Built on Wagtail CMS, brand owners can quickly add content with diverse content blocks and tools, giving them seamless control over their brand guidelines with zero coding.The brand portal’s utilitarian design allows the brand owners to build guideline pages without asking them to rethink their assets. This low friction increases site adoption for owners and shortens their page-building timeline. Predefined templates ensure any content published looks consistently well presented across brands.
Brand owners can effortlessly insert the download module anywhere and repurpose it across pages and sites. The download module is designed for high visibility and can be stackable. Cover art thumbnails and descriptions inform the users of its content.
Clicking on a color swatch in the palette module brings up a full flood of color to better assess a color’s presence. To the left of the palette are selectable color formulas with a convenient WCAG tracker to ensure color contrast accessibility.
To be the single source of truth, the adoption from other brands is critical. It is designed to be a workhouse for brand guidelines with a low barrier of entry for Amazon’s “startup-like” brands. Every brand has a different level of maturity and creative resources. Therefore, it’s wise to approach the portal design to be more democratic and away from the “coffee table book” that other singular big brands can afford to do. The brand portal aims to strike a balance between flexibility and protective guardrails that are beneficial to both brand owners and creators.
With a centralized hub for brand guidance and assets, global brand stakeholders at Amazon and their cross-org partners don’t have to worry about outdated content resurfacing and focus on collaborating, unblocking creativity, and improving efficiency.
Credits • Content by the respective Amazon brand parties • Dev John Leonard and team