Introducing the WDG

We’re in the process of creating the Westmorland Design Guide (WDG) - a place to gather all the information that informs the design and development of our MSA’s and more importantly sets the brand standard and the ways in which we can achieve quality and consistency across our sites, whilst at the same time ensuring that each of our MSA’s is of-its-place.

The idea is that we create this ‘Brand Bible’, where each department has their own document to record and maintain the brand standards within their own departments, which in the first instance can be used to inform the detailed design of each department within Tatton services, but beyond that, makes us growth-ready, and can be easily maintained and updated to inform other future development projects, both new-build and refurbs. In addition to that it creates a company knowledge base that fosters inter-departmental collaboration and facilitates the onboarding of future colleagues and consultants.

The WDG has been built with collaboration in mind, with the added challenge of how to create an online document that can be easily updated by multiple contributors without the need for any previous website building or technical know-how, or expensive software subscriptions.

As such the WDG website has been built on popular productivity and note-taking web application Notion, which has a user-friendly note-taking interface which many colleagues may already be familiar with.

Inviting contributors as ‘guests’ into the Design Guide workspace keeps monthly costs low, without the need for a per user per month subscription which might be the case with other setups. Allowing maximum contributors for minimum costs, whilst at the same time providing the built-in connectivity that enables us to build the front-end of the website in a simple, uncluttered and user-friendly way, that maintains an easily-navigable document-style website.

For departments with their own physical spaces i.e. retail, catering etc, we’ve set up a document for each department, for those teams, who feed into all departments, i.e. H&S, IT, Brand, you’ll find space within each document to record your brand standards and requirements. We’ll send out guest invites in due course to allow you to take ownership of the documents and start adding the relevant content.

One of the bonuses of setting up the WDG in this way is to try to reduce the burden on the Design Department to produce such a large document, who otherwise would need to try to organise and coordinate this information from every department, as well as formatting all the documents and creating/sourcing/gathering the images.

The online document is password protected. To view it please click on the link below and enter the password you’ve been issued:

We’ll update the password from time to time, and reissue as and when we do.

I hope that helps to explain the project and I hope it becomes a useful tool for your department going forward.

If you have any issues or queries with the tech or setup please feel free to get in touch and either myself or one of the design team will be able to support.