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Part 3 · Operate

Brand kit

Your colours, fonts, logos, visual style and rules, read off your own site, confirmed by you, and applied to every slide, picture and video.

01What it is

The brand kit is how the venture looks: logos, five colours by role, a heading and a body font, a photo and illustration style, what the brand avoids, rules for visuals, product shots and, only with your consent, photos of you. Every change is a new version, and work keeps the version it was made with.

02Why it exists

Pictures and slides made one at a time drift. One post uses your blue, the next a model's idea of blue, and a feed of them reads as several companies. A kit applied in code keeps every templated piece exact, and a kit given to the picture model as direction and reference keeps generated pictures close.

The kit starts from your own site, because that is where your brand already lives. Colours are read from what the site names them: its CSS variables (the light theme, never the dark one), its buttons, links and page ground, its theme colour tag, its app manifest and the colours of its logo. A grey is never taken as a brand colour, and the secondary is left empty rather than filled with whatever grey the site uses most. Each colour says where it came from and how sure the read is, out of 3. If the site's stylesheets would not load, the page says so instead of passing off a guess from the page alone. Fonts come from what your headings and body set, followed through the site's variables to the real family, and logos from your header, icon and share image, never from a strip of client logos. Everything read is marked "We guessed this" until you confirm it, and reading the site again replaces anything still marked as a guess.

A picture is checked after it is drawn. Its main colours are compared with your palette in code, its brief against your rules, and only then is a model asked whether the style fits. A picture that misses is redrawn once with the reason; if it still misses, you see it with the reason and decide.

03How to use it

  1. 01The kit waits behind the brand_kit flag. Once it is on for your account, open Brand kit under Create in the sidebar and turn it on for the venture. A venture made while the flag is on starts with it on.
  2. 02A venture made with a website, while the kit is on, reads the site by itself just after it is made, so the kit is usually waiting for you. Otherwise press Read my site. Each colour shows where it came from and a confidence out of 3, and everything is marked as a guess. Check the brand board, painted in your own colours, the three previews and your logos on a light and a dark ground, then press Confirm the kit.
  3. 03With What we know on, change the kit’s words there: each word field links to What we know about your venture with the sentence started for you, and you confirm the change. With it off, edit the fields in place. Either way the change is a new version.
  4. 04Upload logos for dark and light grounds on Look, and tick the rules for visuals under Style and rules. On Product shots, press Take screenshots for your public pages, or Capture this page in Sidecar for a page behind your sign-in, and choose which shots the picture model may use as references. Where screenshots are not taken for you, the tab asks you to add product screenshots, with an upload button.
  5. 05Press Make it pretty under any product shot for a styled image on your brand colours: one click with good defaults, the shape, frame, ground and caption under Style, then Save or Download.
  6. 06To appear in your own pictures, record your consent under Your likeness, then add photos of yourself. Revoke at any time; your photos are deleted at once.

04What good looks like

You give it
A site whose stylesheet names --brand #14342b, --canvas #f4f1ea and --ink #14140f on :root, repaints them under prefers-color-scheme: dark, carries a sub-theme’s --ss-brand #1c3557, sets its fonts through var(--font-display) to Newsreader and Switzer, and shows a strip of client logos under the header mark.
You get
Primary #14342b at 3 of 3, background #f4f1ea, text #14140f and accent #a4762b, headings in Newsreader and body in Switzer, and the header mark as the logo with its colours filled in. The sub-theme’s navy, the dark scheme and the client logos are all left out.
Why
extractBrand trusts an exact variable name over a prefixed one, keeps the dark scheme apart, follows var() to the value, and takes the logo from the header’s home link; tests/brand-extract.test.ts holds this site’s shape as a fixture.

Derived from the rules in the code

05What weak looks like, and what it costs

You give it
A picture whose main colours are crimson and green, for a kit that is blue and amber.
You get
It is redrawn once with the instruction to use the brand colours; if the redraw still misses, it reaches the composer with the reason beside it, for you to keep, change or draw again.
Why
paletteFit needs BRAND_COLOUR_MIN_SHARE of the picture’s colourful area within BRAND_COLOUR_MAX_DISTANCE of a brand colour, and the check redraws once, never in a loop.

Derived from the rules in the code

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