When I started at Thetus, the company had been going strong for several years. It was developer heavy and I was the only UX/Design person. Over time we grew to be a team of around a dozen. We all had different ideas & were working on different components of a large software suite.
We had to work together to avoid introducing an interactive piece or style that had been designed and developed in the past. We looked to see how other large companies such as Apple dealt with this and started in on a Visual Design Guide. Below is where we were at when i left the company.
Savanna Style GUide
The Savanna style guide grew out of a necessity to keep various projects at Thetus on the same page. As the company grew, we found we needed consistency across the platform (a suite of tools). We looked at companies like Apple and Microsoft for inspiration and came away with a system wide style guide that tracked everything from font size to color pallet. When we started the document was a few outlines of how style should be treated. When I left Thetus, it had grown into a 50 page detailed outline of how everything from one component to the next should be designed. Below are a few exerts.
We went into great detail. Here is an example showing part of the color palette.
We needed to keep consistency in the suite of tools. We looked at fonts.
Here you can see the detail we went into. This looks at a type of button:
The style guide went into detail for developers. We included red-line markup:
