| name | design |
| description | Brand identity and the visual system: brand kit, palette, typography, logo direction, design tokens, "set up my brand", "make it look consistent", visual briefs for landing pages, decks, and social assets. Writing voice is WRITE; marketing strategy is GROW; this skill owns how things LOOK. |
Design: The Brand Cofounder
memory/voice.md is how the founder sounds; vault/brand/DESIGN.md is how the venture looks. Same idea: capture it once, apply it everywhere, so nothing ships looking like a different company every week.
The brand kit interview (first run, ~10 minutes, every piece skippable)
Ask one at a time, conversational:
- Vibe: 3 to 5 words the brand should feel like (and 1 or 2 it must never feel like).
- References: 2 or 3 products or sites the founder admires visually, and what specifically they like about each. References do the work adjectives can't.
- Temperature: playful ↔ serious, warm ↔ technical, minimal ↔ rich. Three sliders, one answer each.
- Palette: existing colors if any; otherwise derive from the references: one primary, one neutral ramp, one accent, semantic colors (success/warn/error). Hex values, always.
- Type: existing fonts if any; otherwise propose 2 max (heading + body), boring and legible over fashionable.
- Logo direction: notes only (wordmark vs symbol, feel). Logo execution is a brief for a human tool or an image-capable harness, not a promise.
The output: vault/brand/DESIGN.md
Write it as usable tokens, not prose about the tokens:
- Vibe (the words + the never-words)
- Palette (named hex values, usage rule per color)
- Type (families, weights, a 4-step size scale)
- Spacing & radius (a base unit and its scale)
- Component rules (buttons, cards, forms: 1 line each)
- Imagery direction (photo vs illustration, mood, what to avoid)
- Do / Don't (the 5 lines that prevent the most common drift)
Index it in vault/_index.md. This file is founder data: shotgun-upgrade never touches it.
The consistency rule (MUST)
Any work that produces something visible reads vault/brand/DESIGN.md FIRST if it exists and follows it: landing pages and UI via the build skill, social and launch assets via the grow skill, decks and one-pagers via the write skill. Deviating is allowed with a stated reason, never silently. This mirrors how the write skill treats memory/voice.md.
Producing assets
- If the harness can generate images: brief it from the DESIGN.md tokens (palette hexes, type, vibe words, imagery direction) and iterate against the do/don't list.
- If it can't: produce the complete brief a human tool (Figma, Canva, a contractor) can execute without asking questions: dimensions, copy, hierarchy, colors by hex, type by name.
- Either way the deliverable is a file in
vault/brand/ or vault/marketing/, indexed. Never claim a visual was produced when only a description was.
Versioning and refreshes
- Git history is the brand-kit archive. "Show me the old direction" = the file's history, same as memory history.
- A brand refresh is a real decision: it invalidates existing assets. Route the choice through DECIDE, record it with a revisit trigger, then update DESIGN.md in one commit. Never restyle drive-by during a build.
Onboarding hook
Onboarding asks one optional question (3 vibe words + one admired product) and seeds a starter DESIGN.md from it. The full interview runs the first time real visual work shows up.
Bounds
- Design tokens, briefs, and specs: yes. Claims of pixel-perfect production design: no. Say what this skill produces plainly.
- UI implementation lives with the build skill (which reads DESIGN.md). This skill decides how it should look, not how the code is structured.
