InVision Acquires Brand.ai and Introduces Design System Manager

New tool provides definitive solution for product teams to rapidly build consistent experiences at scale

NEW YORK--()--InVision, the digital product design platform for creating the world’s best user experiences, has acquired Brand.ai, a leading platform for managing design systems, and introduced InVision Design System Manager (DSM). The teams’ combined efforts have resulted in the definitive tool to help every product team create their own design system and innovate at scale like the world’s most design-forward companies.

Every digital business faces a crucial challenge when they begin to scale—how to ship great products quickly while still delivering a consistent user experience across multiple products and teams. When there is not an agreed upon, up-to-date set of design elements and guidelines shared across teams, user experiences become less coherent, teams waste effort re-designing and engineering the same elements over and over, and it becomes increasingly difficult to update and maintain one’s digital presence. Together, this results in poorer user experiences, a slowed pace of innovation, and higher development and support costs. The world’s best digital businesses rely on design systems to help them address this challenge. However, in the absence of design system tooling, these teams have been forced to cobble together homegrown solutions and processes that are neither scalable nor enterprise ready.

Helping every company address this challenge is what inspired InVision to join forces with the Brand.ai team and develop DSM as the definitive solution for designing products at scale. It provides teams with the following benefits:

  • Create a single source of truth: InVision DSM gives teams one place to manage all brand and UX components, so teams can stay in sync.
  • Design with ease: Designers can access the library seamlessly inside of tools like Sketch and InVision Studio and, when necessary, push and pull changes to assets, colors, text and layer styles, and even deeply nested symbols with a click.
  • Iterate with confidence: The entire library is versioned and synced across the whole team so designers can update to the latest version or roll back at any time.
  • Manage updates collaboratively: DSM provides complete control over who can view or edit each library within the company’s system with roles and permissions.
  • Share with external teams: DSM provides an automatically generated and customizable web portal, giving external teams the ability to preview and use the design system.
  • Keep code in sync: When it’s time to loop developers in, they can use the DSM API to connect to a hosted code library that integrates a company’s design system directly into live code.
  • Protect confidential information: InVision DSM is created to be enterprise ready from the start, with features like SSO, private cloud, and more to protect your company’s most strategic assets.

“Every organization creating digital experiences has a mandate to do more and move faster. The challenge is that as teams scale, so do the challenges of maintaining consistency of design and creating quality digital products worthy of their customers’ love,” said InVision CEO and Co-Founder Clark Valberg. “Over the last few years, we’ve worked with and studied the best digital product teams in the world and we’ve seen that they all have a comprehensive, functional design system in place to help address this challenge. Together with the Brand.ai team, we’re bringing those insights to the world with this incredibly powerful new tool.”

Beloved by thousands of teams and leading Fortune 500 companies, Brand.ai is one of the most widely used tools for digital product teams looking to manage their design system. The team has joined InVision, bringing their technology and expertise to the creation of Design Systems Manager.

“To run at optimal capacity, design teams need to function as a cohesive unit, as opposed to just the sum of their parts,” said Brand.ai CEO Ehud Halberstam. “Our goal has always been to create a platform for design systems that empowers designers and promotes creativity through cohesion. Joining the InVision team gives us the ability to execute on this on a much larger playing field, bringing our passion for scalable design to millions of users.”

Customer Quotes:

“InVision DSM isn’t just about smoothing out someone's workflow, it's about enabling their voice and allowing them to play a more active role in the process of designing as a team,” said Dan Ross, UX Designer at Shopify. “A good design system should empower designers instead of restricting them, and this tool absolutely furthers that goal."

"This is an impressive tool,” said Nathan Whitson, Senior Principal Designer at LinkedIn. “There's a huge need in the design tools market for a solution that bridges the gap between designers and engineers, and I look forward to seeing how InVision tackles that challenge."

The launch of InVision Design Systems Manager comes on the heels of the launch of InVision Studio, the world’s most powerful screen design tool. DSM will be available to preview in December 2017. In the meantime, visit this link for more information and keep an eye out for some exciting design systems news, including our upcoming new book from DesignBetter.Co, co-authored with design systems leaders from Etsy, Github, Airbnb, and more.

About InVisionApp

InVision is the digital product design platform powering the world’s best user experiences. We give digital product teams everything they need to effortlessly navigate every stage of their process, from ideation to developer hand off, all in one place.

Millions of people use InVision to create a streamlined and scalable product design process; rapidly build, test and iterate on prototypes; and collaborate across their entire organization. InVision powers the digital product design process at more than 80 percent of the Fortune 100, and organizations like Airbnb, Amazon, HBO, Netflix, Nike, Slack, Starbucks, and Uber use InVision to build digital experiences that customers love.

InVision is a fully distributed company with employees in more than 20 countries around the world. The company has raised more than $135 million in funding from leading investors including Accel, ICONIQ, FirstMark, and Tiger Global. Visit us at InVisionApp.com and InVisionApp.com/blog.

Contacts

InVision
Lindsey Scott
Director of PR and Communications
press (at) invisionapp (dot) com

Contacts

InVision
Lindsey Scott
Director of PR and Communications
press (at) invisionapp (dot) com