Brand Identity skill for Claude Code

A brand identity is done when a stranger could pick your product’s screen, email or slide out of a lineup of competitors with the logo covered; when two different people following the guide produce work that looks like the same company; and when every rule in the guide has a reason tied to the positioning, not to taste.

Scope

This skill owns the decisions: positioning, personality, voice, distinctive assets, logo rules, brand palette and typeface choice, imagery, and the guide that records them. Turning them into a production palette with contrast-checked roles is color-systems; type scales and font loading are typography-scale; token files are design-system-tokens; product UI copy rules are ux-microcopy.

Ground rules

• Positioning before pixels. No color or font discussion until the one-sentence position and the audience are written down and agreed.
• Banned personality words unless defined by a behavior: innovative, modern, clean, trustworthy, simple, friendly, bold, cutting-edge. Every product claims them.
• Distinctiveness over prettiness. A brand that looks like the category leader borrows its awareness and builds none of its own.
• Fewer assets, applied harder. One owned color, one display face, one graphic device used everywhere beats a sprawling kit used inconsistently.
• Never imitate a real brand’s marks, names or trade dress, and check trademark and font licensing before anything ships.

Workflow

- [ ] 1. Gather inputs: product, audience, competitors, existing assets, constraints
- [ ] 2. Category audit: what everyone in the space looks and sounds like
- [ ] 3. Positioning statement and brand idea
- [ ] 4. Personality as 3 tension pairs + "we are / we are not"
- [ ] 5. Voice and tone rules with before/after examples
- [ ] 6. Distinctive assets: color, type, graphic device, imagery, (sound/motion)
- [ ] 7. Logo system and usage rules
- [ ] 8. Apply to 4 real surfaces and revise
- [ ] 9. Write the brand guide and asset export list

1. Inputs

Ask for, or infer and state as assumptions: what the product does, the primary buyer and user, 5–10 competitors, current logo/colors/fonts and whether any are fixed, channels that matter (app UI, docs, sales decks, social, packaging), and constraints (budget for font licenses, accessibility requirements, regulated industry).

2. Category audit

Collect screenshots of 6–10 competitors’ homepages, app screens and social profiles. Build a table:

Brand	Dominant color	Type style	Imagery	Voice sample	Graphic device
Competitor A	Navy + teal	Geometric sans	3D isometric	“Empower your team…”	Gradient blobs

Then decide explicitly:

• Category codes to keep (signals that you belong): e.g. a security product keeps a sober register; a kids’ app keeps legibility and warmth.
• Category codes to break (where you will be different): the color nobody owns, the type style nobody uses, the voice nobody dares.

Category defaults to avoid by name: fintech navy-and-teal, AI purple-to-blue gradients with glowing orbs, devtools black with neon green, health mint-and-white with stock smiles, generic SaaS “blob people” illustrations.

3. Positioning and brand idea

For [specific audience] who [situation/pain], [Product] is the [category frame]
that [primary benefit]. Unlike [main alternative], it [real differentiator with proof].
Brand idea (3–6 words, the thing every expression should carry): "Paperwork, finally quiet."

If the differentiator cannot be proven with a product fact, the brand will have nothing to say — escalate that to the user instead of designing around it.

4. Personality

Express personality as tension pairs — each half constrains the other:

Is	But never
Precise	Cold or bureaucratic
Warm	Cutesy or exclamation-heavy
Confident	Smug or hyperbolic

Add a “we are / we are not” list with 4–6 rows. Every row must be checkable against a piece of work (e.g. “We explain the number before the adjective”).

5. Voice and tone

Voice is constant; tone flexes by situation. Position the voice on four sliders (scale 1–5): funny ↔ serious, casual ↔ formal, irreverent ↔ respectful, enthusiastic ↔ matter-of-fact. Then give a tone map:

Situation	Tone shift	Example
Marketing headline	Most expressive	“Close the books by Tuesday.”
Error / outage	Plain, accountable, no jokes	“Exports are failing. We’re on it — next update 14:30 UTC.”
Billing / legal	Formal, exact	“Your plan renews on 3 April at $480.”

Include 5 before/after rewrites of the user’s real copy. Add a vocabulary list: words we use, words we avoid, product terms with exact capitalization.

6. Distinctive assets

Choose deliberately, one primary per type:

• Owned color. One hue the category does not use, at a specific value (give hex and OKLCH), plus neutrals with a tint of it. Define proportions: e.g. 70% neutral surfaces, 20% ink, 10% brand color. A brand color used on every surface stops being distinctive. Hand off to color-systems for scales and contrast roles.
• Typeface. One display face with character (a grotesk with distinctive letterforms, a serif, a mono for technical brands) plus one workhorse text face (can be the same family). Check licensing for web, app embedding and the number of monthly views; open-source options (SIL OFL) avoid surprises. Record weights used — usually 2–3.
• Graphic device. One repeatable visual element unique to the brand: a crop rule, a grid motif, a shape derived from the logo, a way of annotating screenshots, a texture. It must work at small sizes and in one color.
• Imagery direction. Pick one: real product UI, photography with a defined style (lighting, framing, subjects, color grade), or illustration with a defined style (line weight, palette, perspective). Write 3 do and 3 don’t rules with examples.
• Motion and sound (optional): one easing curve and duration family that matches the personality; hand implementation to ui-motion.

7. Logo system

If a logo exists, document it; if not, brief one (the guide records constraints a designer or logo tool must meet). Rules to define:

• Versions: primary lockup (symbol + wordmark), horizontal and stacked, symbol alone, wordmark alone, one-color (black, white), reversed.
• Clear space: a unit derived from the mark (e.g. the height of the wordmark’s x-height or the symbol’s inner counter) on all sides.
• Minimum sizes: wordmark legible at 80px wide on screen / 25mm in print; symbol at 16px for favicons — if the symbol fails at 16px, create a simplified favicon variant.
• Backgrounds: which versions go on brand color, on photos (with scrim rules), on dark.
• Misuse: stretched, recolored, rotated, effects (shadows, gradients, outlines), rearranged lockups, on busy backgrounds, logo inside a box not defined by the system.
• Co-branding: partner lockup spacing and separator rule.

8. Apply before you finalize

Mock four real surfaces using the system: an app screen or dashboard, a marketing page hero, a social post or OG image (1200×630), and a slide or document cover. Then run:

• Cover test: hide the logo. Can you still tell whose it is? If not, push the owned color, type or device harder.
• Swap test: drop a competitor’s logo in. If it fits without friction, the system is generic.
• Squint test: blur to 10%; hierarchy and brand color proportion should still read.
• One-color test: logo and device work in pure black and pure white.

Revise the assets that fail; do not add new ones to compensate.

9. Brand guide and exports

Write the guide using references/brand-guide-template.md — read it when producing the final document. Keep it short enough to read in 15 minutes; a 60-page PDF nobody opens is worse than a 6-page one people use.

Asset export list for digital products:

Asset	Format / size
Logo master files	SVG (outlined text), plus PNG @1x/@2x on transparent
Favicon	favicon.ico (32×32), icon.svg (with dark-mode media query if needed)
Apple touch icon	180×180 PNG, no transparency, brand background
PWA / Android icons	192×192 and 512×512 PNG, plus a maskable 512 with the mark inside the central 80% safe zone
Social avatar	400×400+, mark centered inside a circle-safe area
OG image template	1200×630 with live-text area
Tokens	color, type, radius and motion values for design-system-tokens

Gotchas

• Picking the brand color from a mood board without checking it as text and button color; many saturated hues fail 4.5:1 on white. Keep a darker “ink” variant.
• Choosing a display font with no license for app embedding or with missing glyphs for the languages you ship (check Latin Extended, Cyrillic, Vietnamese as needed).
• Voice guides with only adjectives. Without before/after examples, writers default to their own voice.
• Rebrands that change the logo but leave product UI, emails and docs on the old system; list every surface and owner in the rollout plan.
• Logo symbols with thin strokes or fine detail that turn to mush at 16–32px.

Output contract

Deliver: the brand guide (from the template), the category audit table, four applied mockups or their specifications, the asset export list with file names, and an open questions list (trademark search, font licensing, legal sign-off) the user must resolve.