style-guide

Capturing a house style

A house style is the difference between an assistant that builds a lower third and one that builds their lower third. It lives in house-style.md beside the .aep file, and get_house_style reads it before any build task.

Your job here is to get one written with as little effort from the user as possible. They are a motion designer. They know exactly what their work looks like and will struggle to dictate it as a specification — so do not ask them to.

Two ways in. Prefer the first.

1. Read it off work they already like

This is far better than any questionnaire, because it produces real numbers instead of adjectives.

1. Ask which comp to learn from — "point me at something that looks the way you want everything to look."

2. get_comp for size and frame rate, then get_layer_full on the layers that carry the look: the text, the background, the accent shapes.

3. Pull out the concrete values — hex colours, font families and sizes, tracking, corner radii, stroke widths, the position of things relative to the frame.

4. Read the keyframes too. get_keyframes plus the ease settings tell you the timing signature: how long a standard in-animation takes, whether it overshoots, whether anything is ever linear.

5. Show them what you found, in their language, and ask what to change:

   Here's what I read off that comp: near-black background #0B0D12, white text in Inter Semibold at 64px with slightly tight tracking, one green accent #3DC46E. Things scale in over about 0.4s with an overshoot to 108% and easy ease on both ends. Nothing sits perfectly still — there's a slow wiggle on the chip. Does that sound like your style, or was that comp a one-off?

6. Write it with set_house_style.

2. Ask, when there is nothing to read

Only if the project is empty or they have no reference. Keep it to four questions, and offer concrete options rather than open ones — "dark or light background?" beats "what's your palette?". Then build one small example, show it with screenshot_frame, and refine from their reaction. Reacting is easier than specifying.