The Big Picture - no. 112

Earlier this week we wrapped up a brand sprint and shipped the usual deliverables: brand guide, launch kit, assets, files, etc. But this time we slipped something new into the delivery. An Agentic Brand Kit.

We’ve been talking about and experimenting with this one for a while. The Kit is a packet a client drops straight into their tooling, creates on brand assets: landing page, deck, one pager, etc.

What goes into the kit is something we’re still tuning. Right now it looks like this:

bolster-agentic-brand-kit/
├── README.md          ← human entry
├── AGENTS.md / CLAUDE.md
├── verbal/
│ ├── positioning.md   ← Futura strategy roadmap, positioning
│ ├── messaging.md     ← voice, hero lines, CTAs
│ └── naming.md        ← divisions, taglines
├── visual/
│ ├── creative-direction.md  ← the rules/guidance from real designers
│ ├── color.md
│ ├── type.md
│ ├── logo.md
│ └── assets/          ← fonts, imagery, logos
└── examples/          ← a series of human-created example applications

The creative direction file is where the essential work lives. It’s where our expertise comes into play and, from our experiments, is what makes the outputs actually usable. It’s the hand on the wheel, steering the outputs toward what we actually intended (as close as a machine can get).

The Kit, much like a traditional brand guide, is a constraint system, not a creativity system. Everything it makes is a recombination of what we fed it. Most of the time, faithful repetition is the whole job.

But not always. Sometimes the moment calls for a genuinely new idea, something no recombination can reach. That’s when we step back in.

Figuring out how we interact with the Kit and use it to our clients’ benefit, when and how we step in, are all things we’re currently experimenting with.

A brand is a living thing, or (we believe) it should be. So how do we keep the Kit alive? Not a file you download once or one that gets fragmented over time, but a brand that breathes with your business as it grows, shifts, and reinvents itself.

So here’s the open question. How do we best share and evolve a system like this, a little like a codebase, so a brand can keep moving without ever losing itself? I have some ideas. I’d love yours.

And if you’re interested in brand-ai-enablement, come find me. We’re piloting this now, and I’m looking for a few brands to build and test it with.

Sensory Links

• Audio — Miles in France

• Analog — why control rooms are seafoam green

• Digital — “My agents purpose is to absorb as much of my digital responsibilities as possible so I can live as analog as possible