brand

Brand

This is the front door for any brand work, and it has two jobs:

1. Understand what exists, diagnose how much should change, and route. The depth of the work — a ground-up build, a refresh, or just better execution — is your diagnosis to make from the evidence. The user does not need to know the framework behind it.
2. Own the record. Get-or-make .agents/brand.md — the single source of truth for the brand's visual identity that every other design skill reads first, so the user never re-explains their colors, type, muses, or latitude.

brand always runs. brand-strategy is the deep generative path it routes to — and when the brand is already sound, it routes away from strategy entirely. That's why they're separate skills: one runs without the other.

Step 1: Gather the Assets — Do the Legwork Yourself

Start here, always — and take this off the user's plate. Don't hand them a homework assignment ("send me your logo files, your colors, your social links, your decks…"). Get the one thing you actually need to begin — the website URL (or, failing that, the company name) — and go find the rest yourself.

From just the domain, gather autonomously:

• Crawl the key pages, not only the homepage — home, product/features, pricing, about, blog. Each surface uses the brand differently.
• Extract real values from the rendered pages — computed colors, font-family names, type scale, spacing, button/CTA treatment, radii, shadows.
• Capture the logo — and make sure it's the current one. The source of truth for the live mark is the navigation bar / header of the rendered site, nothing else. Inspect the actual <header>/<nav> and pull the exact asset it uses — the <img src>, the inline <svg>, or the CSS background-image. A plain text/markdown fetch strips this out, so read the raw HTML/DOM or screenshot the nav and confirm what you extracted matches what's on screen.
  • Favicons, apple-touch-icons, manifest icons, OG images, social avatars, and press-kit downloads are frequently outdated — teams refresh the nav logo and forget the rest. Treat them as secondary: useful for collecting the other implementations (small, square, reversed), but reconcile every one against the nav logo. If they disagree, the live nav wins as "current," and the mismatch is itself a finding (stale assets to fix).
  • You still want the full set — a mark's simplicity is judged by whether it's the same mark across all of them — but the nav logo is the reference, not the favicon. Don't let an old favicon or a stale press kit stand in for the current identity.
• Follow the footer. Almost every site links its own social profiles, app-store listings, and sometimes a press or brand page down there. Harvest those links and follow them.
• Check the common brand/press paths — /brand, /brand-assets, /press, /media-kit, /about/brand. Companies routinely publish logos, palettes, and usage rules there.
• Screenshot and actually look at the rendered design — don't score from tokens alone. A brand's identity often lives in things a CSS/token dump or a product-UI Figma never expose: a recurring graphic motif (a radial, shape, or texture repeating across the hero, sections, and social), the accent colors used only in the hero or social art, and the logo's symbol/glyph. Examine the hero, feature graphics, and social posts directly. Never conclude "no pattern" or "wordmark-only, no mark" from tokens — confirm with your eyes. These feed Pattern & Texture, Color, and Logo, and missing them is how a strong brand gets mis-scored as weak.
• Read the codebase if you're in it. A site repo's CSS / Tailwind config / design-token files are the most precise source there is — prefer them over anything inferred from a screenshot.
• Pull Figma if a link or connected file is available.
• Source the competitor set from the marketing context — don't freelance it. Identifying competitors by gut is hit-or-miss; pull the authoritative set instead, in this order:
  1. .agents/product-marketing.md (from the marketing-skills library) — if it exists, use its Competitive Landscape: direct / secondary / indirect competitors, with why each falls short. The audit scores distinctiveness against the direct set; secondary/indirect inform the landscape but aren't the visual peer group.
  2. The competitor-profiling skill — if there's no marketing context, run it (/competitor-profiling) to research and profile competitors properly, rather than guessing.
  3. Autonomous discovery — fallback only: infer the direct competitors from the category, the positioning, and the brand's own comparison/alternative pages.