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Skill · Brand style guide

Brand style guide.

Document the brand so other people can use it without ambiguity.

The artifact that lives longest. Designers, developers, agencies, and vendors reference it for years, so it is built like a reference manual rather than a presentation. A complete guide covers eight sections; most guides skip two or three and create downstream confusion.

This skill assumes the identity is already designed. Its output is the canonical reference: source files that stay authoritative, with a presentation version (web page, Figma, or PDF) as a view of them.

Audience: brand and design teams documenting a finished identity, auditing an existing guide for gaps, or building a brand book to hand to vendors, partners, and new team members.

View the skill on GitHubBrowse the full catalog

The framework

Eight sections. Build all of them.

A complete guide has eight sections. Skipping any of them creates the gaps that downstream teams discover the hard way.

  1. 01Story: the narrative behind the brand. Origin, mission and vision, values, positioning, audience, and what the brand explicitly rejects.
  2. 02Logo system: every mark and its rules. Construction grid, clear space, minimum sizes, acceptable color treatments, forbidden treatments, and file formats.
  3. 03Color: the full system. Primary, secondary, neutrals, semantics, light and dark variants, contrast ratios, and the allowed and forbidden pairings.
  4. 04Typography: display, body, and monospace, with the scale, weight usage, line height, letter spacing, web fallback stacks, and open-source alternatives.
  5. 05Imagery and illustration: photography direction, illustration style, the iconography set or its rules, and the imagery the brand never uses.
  6. 06Voice and tone: voice attributes framed as 'we are X, not Y,' tone shifts by context, vocabulary preferences, and good-and-bad examples.
  7. 07Applications: the brand applied to web, email, social, print, packaging, signage, and internal documents, each with an example of what good looks like.
  8. 08Dos and don'ts: the boundaries, illustrated. The section people reference most, so the easiest one to scan.

How the skill runs

From inputs to a published guide.

The skill inventories what is finished, drafts section by section against real examples, and ships in the format the team actually opens.

  1. 01

    Inventory the inputs

    What identity work is finished, what voice work is finished, what is missing. Run brand-identity first if the identity is not yet designed.

  2. 02

    Confirm the format

    PDF, web page, Notion, printed book, or several. Different formats carry different production requirements.

  3. 03

    Draft section by section

    Work through the eight sections from the template, keeping each one usable as a reference rather than a pitch.

  4. 04

    Stress-test with real examples

    For every rule, find a real application example. Rules without examples get ignored.

  5. 05

    Get review from the people who will use it

    Designers, developers, and marketers surface the gaps that the author cannot see.

  6. 06

    Version control

    Date the document and note what changed in each version, because the brand evolves and people need to know which rules moved.

  7. 07

    Publish where the team will open it

    A web page, Figma, or Notion with a clear URL gets used. A long PDF on a shared drive is dead weight.

Reference files

Two references that go alongside the SKILL.md.

  • references/style-guide-template.md

    The fillable section-by-section template covering all eight sections of a complete guide.

  • references/maintenance-playbook.md

    How to keep the guide current after launch, so it does not drift from what the brand actually does.

Browse all reference files on GitHub

Bridges to other skills

What feeds the guide, and what it feeds.

The style guide documents a finished identity and hands it to the teams who build on it.

  • Comes first

    brand-identity

    Designs the five-element system this guide documents. If the identity is not yet designed, run it first; the guide assumes a finished logo, color, type, imagery, and motion.

  • Voice section

    brand-voice

    Produces the voice and tone work that becomes the guide's voice section. Do the voice doc there, then integrate it here.

  • Applying the brand

    design-standards

    Where the documented brand turns into real pages and components: tokens, contrast, hierarchy, and the day-to-day production calls.

  • The component library

    design-system

    Operationalizes the brand at scale as a documented component library. The style guide is the brand reference; the design system is the build reference.

Open source under MIT

Read the SKILL.md on GitHub.

The skill source lives in the rampstackco/claude-skills repository alongside dozens of other skills covering the full lifecycle of brand and product work. This page is a structured overview; the SKILL.md is the source. MIT licensed.

View SKILL.mdBrowse the full catalog

Frequently asked questions.

What does a complete style guide include?
Eight sections: story, logo system, color, typography, imagery and illustration, voice and tone, applications, and dos and don'ts. Most guides skip two or three of them and create downstream confusion when someone hits the gap. Build all eight from the start, and make each section usable as a reference rather than as a presentation.
Why does the dos-and-don'ts section matter so much?
It is the section people actually reference in practice. Make it the easiest one to scan, with visual examples of correct and incorrect use across logo, color, type, composition, and voice. Treating it as filler is a mistake; it carries more day-to-day weight than the more formal sections above it.
Should every rule come with an example?
Yes, both rules and examples. A document with rules but no examples is abstract and gets ignored. A document with examples but no rules cannot be applied to new situations the examples did not anticipate. For every rule, find a real application example, and for every example, state the rule it illustrates.
Should the guide document what the brand wishes or what it does?
What is actually true. Aspirational rules the brand does not follow get treated as suggestions and erode the rest of the guide's authority. Document the system as it really operates. The same applies to the 'what we are not' parts of each section: without rejection rules, anything becomes acceptable over time.
What format should the guide ship in?
The format the team opens daily: a web page, a Figma file, or a Notion doc with a clear URL. A 200-page PDF on a shared drive is dead weight that no one opens. Keep the source files canonical and treat the presentation version as a view of them. Date the document and record what changed in each version, because the brand evolves and people need to know which rules moved and when.
When should I run brand-identity first?
When the identity is not yet designed. The style guide documents a finished identity, so it assumes the logo system, color, typography, imagery direction, and motion principles already exist. If they do not, run brand-identity first to design the system, then return here to document it.