brand-designer

Brand Designer

A systematic toolkit for documenting brand identity. Elicits brand information through structured templates, validates completeness, compiles into reference documents, and generates brand-compliant images.

Quick Start

# 1. Scaffold a new brand
brand-book init ./my-brand --name "Acme Corp"

# 2. Fill in the templates (7 markdown files)
#    Start with strategy.md → visual-id.md → voice.md

# 3. Validate your work
brand-book validate ./my-brand/strategy.md --strict

# 4. Compile output
brand-book compile ./my-brand --artifact brand-card    # One-page summary
brand-book compile ./my-brand --artifact full           # Full brand book

# 5. Generate brand image (optional)
generate brand-card --brand-dir ./my-brand --layout landscape

When to Use This Skill

Trigger	Artifact	Audience
"I need a brand card for press/stakeholders"	Brand card (image + one-pager)	Executives, press, partners
"I need to document my brand strategy"	Strategy memo	Leadership, marketing
"I need visual identity documentation"	Visual identity spec	Designers, developers
"I need brand voice guidelines"	Voice & messaging spec	Writers, content team
"Turn our approved customer message into brand voice guidelines"	Strategy/voice handoff with claim evidence	Brand owners, writers
"I need a full brand book for agency handoff"	Compiled brand book	Agencies, partners
"I need to inventory all my brand assets"	Asset inventory	Everyone

When not to use

Use go-to-market for audience selection, alternatives, differentiation, customer narrative development and messaging experiments. Consume the approved message brief here rather than creating a second messaging method.

Use product-design-and-ux for task flows and interaction behavior, frontend-engineering for component implementation, and web-accessibility for accessibility conformance. A brand guide does not replace those disciplines.

For an unsettled identity, vague feedback, or drift across generated assets, read reference-led visual direction before filling templates. Establish a scoped style guide through concrete examples and preserve approved decisions without turning every example into a global rule.

Before generating files or changing existing brand artifacts, confirm the target, scope, and rollback path. Read-only discovery may proceed without confirmation.

Workflow

1. Choose artifact type

The decision tree in references/canonical-components.md maps brand maturity to artifact scope:

• Startup (<10 people) → Brand card + Strategy memo (condensed)
• Growing (10-50) → Full visual identity + voice specs
• Scaling (50-200) → All specs + governance framework
• Enterprise (200+) → Full system + asset inventory + compiled brand book

2. Fill templates

7 templates live in templates/. Start with strategy (it informs everything else), then visual-id, voice, and the rest:

Template	What It Captures	Depends On
strategy.md	Positioning, personality, mission, audience	—
visual-id.md	Logo system, color palette, typography, iconography, imagery	Strategy
voice.md	Voice attributes, tone matrix, vocabulary, copy examples	Strategy
application.md	Digital, print, social, co-branding rules	Visual identity
governance.md	Versioning, review cadence, exceptions	—
asset-inventory.md	Structured file index	All others
brand-card.md	Condensed visual summary (sources from others)	Strategy, visual-id, voice

Filling technique: Replace {{placeholders}} in each template with your brand's information. Required fields are marked in frontmatter. Optional fields can be removed.

For messaging or website-copy handoffs, read references/customer-message-handoff.md before filling strategy and voice. Record the brief's version, approval status, evidence gaps and owner in the existing templates. Approval does not establish that its claims are true or tested.

When writing channel or audience variants, read references/message-adaptation-examples.md. Produce the actual expressions and check their audience, offer, mechanism, claim limits and action commitment against the source brief; explain how the wording reflects the established voice.

3. Validate

brand-book validate ./my-brand/visual-id.md              # Basic checks
brand-book validate ./my-brand/brand-card.md --strict     # Cross-reference checks
brand-book validate ./my-brand/*.md                       # Batch check all

Validation catches:

• Missing required fields
• Incomplete color values (missing RGB, CMYK, or Pantone)
• Cross-reference breaks (brand-card sourcing from nonexistent specs)

4. Compile

brand-book compile ./my-brand --artifact brand-card                        # One-pager
brand-book compile ./my-brand --artifact full                              # Full book
brand-book compile ./my-brand --artifact full --format html --output book.html  # HTML

The --artifact selector maps to individual templates or the compiled whole. See references/artifact-hierarchy.md for the complete taxonomy.

5. Generate images (optional)

generate brand-card --brand-dir ./my-brand --layout landscape    # Press kit card
generate mockup --brand-dir ./my-brand --type social             # Social media mockup
generate swatch --brand-dir ./my-brand                           # Color palette card
generate moodboard --brand-dir ./my-brand --theme "innovation"  # Mood board
generate logo-bg primary --brand-dir ./my-brand --background dark  # Logo on dark

The generate script is prompt-engineering-first: it reads your brand data and constructs optimized prompts for image generation backends. For best results with accurate logo rendering, provide reference images alongside the prompt.

Before finalizing adapted copy, load go-to-market and its final-copy fact check. Check actual NEW brand expressions against the brief before rendering them. Show a compact claim/support plan, not just a critique of the original slogan. Tone edits cannot add technical properties or service promises, and missing evidence does not prove absence.

Completion Check

For message-driven brand work, verify that strategy, voice examples and application copy preserve the same audience, meaningful difference, claim limits and action expectations. Keep evidence and approval states visible. If the brief conflicts with positioning or lacks consequential evidence, return those decisions to go-to-market; continue only the documented, supported portion. Complete when the requested brand artifacts, unresolved decisions and handoff owner are recorded.

Scripts Reference

scripts/brand-book

The main CLI. Subcommands:

Command	Action
init <dir> [--name]	Scaffold brand directory with 7 templates
compile <dir> [--artifact] [--format] [--output]	Assemble brand artifact
validate <file...> [--strict] [--json]	Check frontmatter completeness
preview <file> [--json]	Terminal preview of a brand component

All subcommands support --json for machine output and --dry-run for preview.

scripts/generate

Image prompt construction for brand-compliant generation. Subcommands:

Command	Action
`brand-card [--layout portrait	landscape]`
`mockup --type stationery	social
swatch	Palette visualization prompt
moodboard [--theme]	Mood board prompt
logo-bg <variant> [--background]	Logo presentation prompt

Reference Files

File	What It Contains
references/message-adaptation-examples.md	Voice and channel adaptations, semantic anchors and misleading near misses
references/customer-message-handoff.md	Approved messaging into strategy, voice, imagery and application guidelines
references/canonical-components.md	Definitive component hierarchy + maturity decision tree
references/artifact-hierarchy.md	Every artifact: who consumes it, format, depth, relationships
references/gold-standard-analysis.md	Structural analysis of Cash App, IBM, Netflix, Bang & Olufsen, Klarna
references/brand-card-formats.md	Format comparison: PDF vs online vs CLI vs Figma vs image
references/template-schemas.md	Complete YAML frontmatter schemas for all 7 templates
references/image-generation.md	Brand-compliant image prompt patterns and reference-image usage

Artifact Tiers Summary

Tier 0: Brand Card          → image + one-pager        → stakeholders, press
Tier 1: Strategy Memo       → narrative document       → leadership, marketing
Tier 2: Visual Identity     → structured spec          → designers, developers
Tier 3: Voice & Messaging   → guidelines with examples → writers, content
Tier 4: Application         → channel-by-channel rules → producers, agencies
Tier 5: Governance          → framework document       → brand owners, legal
Tier 6: Asset Inventory     → indexed table            → everyone
       └── Compiled Brand Book (Tiers 0-6 combined)    → agencies, partners

Gotchas

Templates are elicitation tools, not final designs

The templates produce markdown documentation, not designed PDFs. The content is structured and correct; visual polish is a post-processing step. If you need a beautifully designed PDF, export the markdown and lay it out in InDesign/Figma.

Color accuracy in generated images

Generated images will approximate brand colors, not match them precisely. The generate swatch command provides hex values in the prompt, but image models interpret color imprecisely. For Pantone-accurate color reference, use the documented values in the spec, not generated images.

Reference-image-aware generation is setup-dependent

The generate script constructs prompts regardless of backend. To use reference images (logos, existing materials) for better results, you need a generation setup that supports image inputs — e.g., ComfyUI, local Stable Diffusion with img2img, or an API that accepts image references. The prompts work without this; they just improve with it.

Brand card sources from other templates

The brand-card template uses source: frontmatter links to strategy, visual-id, and voice templates. This means: compile may show placeholder text if those source templates aren't filled yet. Fill strategy + visual-id before expecting a complete brand card.

The skill produces documents, not art

The image generation capability exists, but the primary output is structured documentation — markdown that can live in a vault, be versioned in git, and be compiled into various formats. The images are the garnish, not the meal.

See Also

• nous-branding — Reference-image generation for Nous Research brand
• cli-builder — Patterns used by the brand-book CLI
• references/image-generation.md — Detailed prompt craft guide