color-palette-brief

Color Palette Brief

What This Skill Does

Generates a detailed color palette brief with named colors, hex codes, rationale, and usage guidance for a media project's visual identity — show artwork, editorial imagery, website, or social media.

When To Use This Skill

• You are establishing the visual identity of a new podcast, YouTube channel, newsletter, or publication and need to define a color system
• You want to brief a designer on the color direction for a project with enough specificity that they can build the palette without a conversation
• You need to maintain color consistency across AI-generated images, social posts, and designed assets
• You have a vague color direction in mind ("something warm and earthy") and need it translated into specific, usable values

What You Need To Provide

Required:

• Project name and a brief description of what it is
• The emotional tone and personality of the project (how should it feel?)
• The audience (who is it for?)

Optional:

• Any colors you already know you want (even approximate — "a dark teal," "a warm off-white")
• Named reference brands, publications, or shows whose palette you want to approach or diverge from
• The platform(s) where the palette will be used (web, print, video, social media)
• Whether you need dark mode and light mode variants
• Any colors to avoid and why

How the Assistant Approaches This

1. Derives the palette from the project's personality and audience: what colors communicate the right feeling, and what associations must be avoided
2. Builds a structured system: primary color (the identity anchor), secondary color (support and contrast), accent color (for calls to action and highlights), neutral/background colors (light and dark), and a danger or caution color (for use sparingly)
3. Provides each color with: a descriptive name, a hex code, an RGB value, and a one-sentence usage note
4. Explains the palette's logic — why these specific colors were chosen and what they communicate together
5. Provides prompt-ready color language for AI image generation: phrases that consistently produce images within the palette
6. Closes with a "Next Step" note: the first practical action after receiving the palette (test the hex codes in your design tool, run visual-identity-prompt to build the full visual system, or run cover-image-pipeline to produce the first asset using these colors)