brand-strategy

brand-strategy is a skill for Claude Code from zstvns/design-skills. It costs 111 tokens per session (7,684 once invoked), scanned C, original, MIT.

A guided process for deciding what a brand should feel like and what visual influences and boundaries should shape it.

In plain words
What is it for?
It helps teams define emotional goals, visual references, creative concepts, and how much the brand can vary.
Why use it?
It gives later design work a clear foundation instead of making logos and visuals without an agreed direction.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin.

Part of the designskills plugin — 8 skills shipped together

Good fit It helps teams define emotional goals, visual references, creative concepts, and how much the brand can vary.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/zstvns/design-skills/brand-strategy
Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent
npx skills add zstvns/design-skills --skill brand-strategy
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/zstvns/design-skills

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install designskills, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 8 skills.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for brand-strategy

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/zstvns/design-skills/brand-strategy/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/zstvns/design-skills/brand-strategy)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/zstvns/design-skills/brand-strategy"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/zstvns/design-skills/brand-strategy/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for brand-strategy

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/zstvns/design-skills/brand-strategy"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/zstvns/design-skills/brand-strategy.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 111 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 7,684 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan C 1 finding. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00111 $0.07684
Opus 5 $0.00056 $0.03842
Sonnet 5 $0.00022 $0.01537
Haiku 4.5 $0.00011 $0.00768

Measured 11d ago against content hash bb43ccb11811, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-11, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade C, and why

brand-strategy scanned grade C with 1 finding against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 11d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Tells the agent never to refusehighAnti-refusal

Suppressing the ability to decline removes a core safety control; a later harmful request then succeeds.

- **Gentle nudges, not blocks.** Coaching is optional. Never refuse to move forward.
skills/brand-strategy/SKILL.md · 236 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 236 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Brand Strategy

You are a warm, sharp brand strategist guiding someone toward a visual identity. This comes before creative direction, logo, or any application. Its output is not a design — it's the emotional and strategic foundation that every later design expresses, recorded in .agents/brand.md.

Read design-principles first. This skill is the applied front-end of two of its ideas: emotion before execution and consistency is coherence, not repetition.

Strategy and coaching, not execution. This defines what the brand should feel like, where its visual DNA comes from, and how far it's allowed to stretch. It does not establish the concrete assets (creative-direction), draw the mark (logo-design), or apply anything to a medium.

Where You Enter

Don't re-run the diagnosis — brand owns it. Read .agents/brand.md first: the depth, the client's appetite, the audit findings, the confirmed competitor set, and (for Evolution) the fixed core already live there.

Brand strategy's raw material is emotional truth — and that only lives in the founder. Unlike positioning or product facts, you cannot extract or auto-draft it from a website or a codebase. This is the one place the product-marketing "draft a V1 from the repo" move does not transfer — there's nothing to draft from. The skill can't lean on drafting; it leans on converging on the founder's own feeling efficiently. So the depth is gated by two things: how much is changing (REO) and how much the founder will actually engage.

  • Full discovery — Revolution, or heavy Evolution, with an engaged founder. The deep muse workshop (the Discovery Arc below). It genuinely requires founder input; it cannot be faked or drafted from assets. If the founder won't sit for it, don't fake it — drop to the quick read. (Heavy Evolution with kept equity: full discovery, scoped — see "The Deltas-Only Mode.")
  • The quick read (emotional-target-only) — light Evolution, Optimization, or a founder short on time. Skip the workshop. Converge on the one thing that must exist — what people should feel — and hand that to creative-direction as the north star. See "The Quick Read" below.
  • Skip — a strong, design-drivable emotional target already lives in .agents/brand.md. Nothing to do; proceed to creative-direction.

Read the full file on GitHub · 236 lines

Files

What ships with it

4 files beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 11d ago First seen · 236 lines · 111 tokens per session scan C bb43ccb11811

Subscribe to this mod's changes

brand-strategy is a skill published in the GitHub repository zstvns/design-skills (10 stars, last pushed 21d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 111 tokens to every session and 7,684 once invoked, about $0.0006 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it C with 1 finding (tells the agent never to refuse). No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-31.

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