Brand design

/brand-design — Brand & Design System

Fills the founder's design blind spot. Turns a venture's positioning + name into a world-class, buildable brand and design system: the brand foundation, a visual identity, design tokens that drop straight into the product starter, a component spec, and an asset-production workflow that routes every asset to the right engine — so every surface looks premium without design becoming the thing that stalls the ship. Reads /positioning (the SOURCE of the brand attributes) and /naming-brand (name + verbal identity); feeds starters/saas (tokens + components) and the marketing/social skills (/landing-funnel, /content-engine, /paid-ads, /seo-geo). Industry-agnostic — the aesthetic is read from the venture, never hard-coded.

Load first

1. founder-profile/PROFILE.md, founder-profile/voice-and-brand.md (register, power words, banned words — the verbal filter on every word the brand ships), founder-profile/guardrails.md (drafts only · LYV firewall · claims · original-work).
2. Active ventures/<slug>/venture-context.md — industry, ICP, wedge, any brand delta, and any existing brand kit / assets on hand.
3. Latest /positioning (category, segment, value, messaging pillars) and /naming-brand (name + verbal-identity cues), if they exist. Pull the positioning; never invent a brand in a vacuum here.
4. starters/saas/ — tailwind.config.ts + src/index.css — as the token hand-off target, whenever the venture will build product.

Method (full detail, token map, bible template + worked example in references/method.md)

Six layers, each building on the last:

1. Brand foundation — derive 3–5 brand attributes from the positioning pillars; a personality (archetype + any voice delta on the Founder default); the target psychology (the identity the buyer is buying); and a "we are / we are not" + do/don't table. (Generalizes the pattern in Tony's Executive Edge Brand Bible: essence · target psychology · we-are/we-are-not.)
2. Visual identity — logo direction (concept + wordmark/lettermark/symbol options, clear-space + min-size; original only), a color palette (hex + role + 60/30/10 usage ratios + WCAG-checked pairs), a type system (display/body/mono pairing + a modular scale), and imagery direction.
3. Design tokens — resolve palette/space/type into shadcn/ui variables: a ready-to-paste :root + .dark block in the starter's exact H S% L% format, plus --radius, a space scale, a type scale, and chart tokens. Pastes into starters/saas/src/index.css with no rework.
4. Component / design-system spec — buttons, forms, cards, data displays, badges/stat tiles — each mapped to a shadcn/ui primitive with its variants, sizes, and interaction states. Hand to design:design-system to document/extend.
5. Asset-production workflow — the routing tree: which engine makes which asset. Canva MCP (marketing/social + branded templates; the Canva brand kit mirrors this system), canvas-design (bespoke static art / posters / PDFs), dataviz (charts/dashboards — swap its palette for the tokens), the design:* pack (design-system, design-critique, accessibility-review, ux-copy), Lucid MCP (diagrams).
6. Brand governance — a lightweight brand bible (the single source of truth) + where each source lives (Canva brand kit for marketing, repo tokens for product) so the system stays consistent as cheaper models run it.

Output contract

A venture's brand + design system, in one document, ready to feed the starter and the marketing/social skills:

• Brand foundation — attributes · personality (archetype + voice delta) · target psychology · we-are/we-are-not · do/don't.
• Visual identity — logo direction; palette table (role · hex · H S% L% · usage % · on-color that passes · contrast ratio); type system (pairing + scale); imagery direction.
• Design tokens — a paste-ready :root + .dark HSL block + --radius (starter-compatible), plus space / type / chart scales.
• Component spec — table: component · shadcn primitive · variants · sizes · states · notes.
• Asset-production workflow — the routing tree (asset → engine → skill/MCP → source of truth → gate) + governance.
• Brand bible — the lightweight template, filled.

Every color pairing carries a WCAG AA pass/fail note; everything is a draft.

Rules (guardrails woven in)

• Original designs only. Never copy or closely imitate an existing artist's or brand's identity, logo, layout, or imagery (copyright). Reference direction — mood, era, principle — never artwork or a specific mark. canvas-design enforces the same rule; echo it on every asset.
• Drafts only; $0. Canva/asset exports, brand-kit edits, font licenses, stock, and any purchase are drafts/proposals — Tony approves. Nothing is bought, published, or made-live here.
• Voice is a hard filter on every word the brand ships (taglines, UX copy, captions): clinical, precise, premium. Power words yes; the banned register (journey, wellness-as-vibe, holistic, hack(n.), revolutionary, game-changer, guru, hype) is auto-rejected — in visuals as well as copy.
• Positioning-driven. Attributes derive from the /positioning pillars. If positioning is missing, produce a provisional frame and flag it — don't guess a brand from nothing.
• WCAG AA is non-negotiable. Body text ≥ 4.5:1, large text (≥ 24px, or ≥ 18.66px bold) and UI/graphical objects ≥ 3:1, focus indicators ≥ 3:1 against adjacent colors. Every pairing is validated (route to design:accessibility-review). An inaccessible pair is never shipped as final.
• Token hand-off is exact. Tokens use the starter's shadcn variable names and H S% L% format so they paste in without rework. Extend the config (add a brand ramp / chart tokens); never fork it.
• Industry-agnostic. Read the aesthetic from the venture context; never hard-code a category's look. Honor the venture's claims & regulatory constraints (from its venture-context + engineering-backbone §9); make only substantiated claims; route any regulated claim (health / financial / legal / environmental) for professional review; never promise a capability the venture can't deliver today.
• LYV firewall. Never reuse LYV brand assets, kits, fonts, or audiences for a solely-owned venture.

Tools & handoffs (this module orchestrates a stack)

• Canva MCP — list-brand-kits · create-brand-template-draft · generate-design(-structured) · export-design · resize-design: marketing + social assets built from the tokens; the Canva brand kit is the marketing-side mirror of this system.
• canvas-design skill — bespoke static art / posters / one-pagers / PDFs (original, never copied).
• dataviz skill — charts, stat tiles, dashboards; swap its references/palette.md for this system's chart tokens so viz reads as one brand.
• design:* pack — design-system (document/extend the component spec) · design-critique (review a surface) · accessibility-review (WCAG audit) · ux-copy (microcopy in-voice) · design-handoff (dev spec).
• Lucid MCP — brand-architecture / system diagrams.
• Feeds: starters/saas (tokens + components) and /landing-funnel · /content-engine · /paid-ads · /seo-geo · /content-cadence.

Examples & evals

• references/method.md — the full six-layer method, the shadcn token-mapping table, the brand-bible template + a worked example (Executive Edge, generalized from Tony's Brand Bible).
• evals/evals.md — 3 cases (venture with context · net-new no-context / industry-agnostic · a contrast-fail + off-voice + copied-brand catch).