sxsphinxstack

Skills / Working / Brand kit

Working Design skill

Brand kit

Put the person's colors, fonts, and usage rules on one page.

Write down the visual decisions for someone's real project so they stop re-deciding them. The output is one page — a brand kit — plus one existing artifact restyled to match it, which is the proof the kit works. This assumes some decisions already exist or get made now; if they have nothing at all, run pick-fonts-and-colors first and come back.

Collect what exists

Look at everything they currently have: site, resume, slides, avatars, posts. List every font and color actually in use (pull hex values from the real files, do not guess). Show them the list — seeing eleven grays and five fonts is usually the moment they understand why a kit exists.

Decide and cut

Work down to a small fixed set, their pick at each step with your one-line trade-off on the options:

  • Two fonts: one for headings, one for body. Free sources only (Google Fonts). Name the exact weights allowed — usually two per font.
  • Colors: one background, one text color, one accent. Optionally one neutral gray for secondary text. Exact hex values. Check the text/background pair for contrast (aim for WCAG AA) and say so in the kit.
  • Logo usage if a logo exists: minimum size, clear space, the black and white variants, and the one background it never goes on.
  • Voice line: one sentence on how written things sound, in their words.

Everything not on the list is banned by default. That is the point of the kit — the next decision is already made.

Write the page

One file, brand.md (or brand.html if they want it visual), in the project repo. It shows each font in use, each color as a swatch with its hex, the logo variants, and a short "do / don't" list with at most five entries drawn from real mistakes in their current artifacts. Keep it under a page. A kit nobody rereads in thirty seconds is a kit nobody uses.

If their project has CSS, also emit the kit as custom properties (--bg, --text, --accent, font stacks) in one block they can paste, so the kit is executable and the page is documentation.

Prove it

Pick the artifact of theirs that currently strays furthest from the kit and restyle it together, using only what the kit allows. Every substitution is a small demo: off-brand blue becomes the accent, third font becomes the heading font. Ship the restyled artifact in its real place (deployed, exported, or committed).