Reading · The Big Picture

Last issue I was ruminating on how to keep an Agentic Brand Kit alive, like a codebase.

This week, iterating on the idea, I ended up making it one. Now it is a repo. The idea is that the commit history could be the actual deliverable. The markdown is what the machine reads. The commit log is what the client buys: continued maintenance, evolution, and updates to the brand.

Brand upkeep needs will vary. Instead of versioned PDF brand guides we have commits.

The logical next step is that the human-facing brand guidelines should also pull from the same repo. So we’re working on an html brand guide that is directly tied in with the repo.

brand-kit/
│
├── guide/                                  ← HUMAN layer: generated brand
│                                             guide site, themed to the brand
│
├── AGENTS.md                               ← AGENT layer: router, which
├── README.md                                 file owns what
├── CHANGELOG.md
│
├── verbal/                                 ┐
│   ├── positioning.md                      │
│   ├── messaging.md                        │
│   └── naming.md                           │  SOURCE OF TRUTH
├── visual/                                 │  both layers read from here
│   ├── creative-direction.md               │
│   ├── color.md · type.md · logo.md        │
│   └── assets/ → logos, imagery, fonts     ┘
│
├── examples/
│   ├── good/
│   └── wrong/
└── tests/
    └── prompts.md

Earlier this week we pitched a dev tool brand on a rebrand. In the pitch we showed a project from last year we haven’t shared much.

Dagger, co-founded by Solomon Hykes (co-founder of Docker) needed a super fast rebrand and relaunch of their site. Super fast is not even quite adequate to describe the speed needed. Prior to this they looked nondescript and typical dev-tool. Poorly executed linear-style visuals. The brief was, make a look nothing like any other dev-tool brand.

Solomon works with this illustrator to translate his ideas and concepts into visual form. Perfect. We took those and made them central part of the brand.

Visual — Photo 51 is an photo captured in 1952 that confirmed the prior postulated double helical structure of DNA. Fascinating controversy surrounds the credit of the image.
Visual — I like this kinda thing. Illustrations by Ilya Milstein

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.

The Big Picture - no. 114

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