pbakaus_impeccable/skill/reference/brand.md

Brand register

When design IS the product: brand sites, landing pages, marketing surfaces, campaign pages, portfolios, long-form content, about pages. The deliverable is the design itself; a visitor's impression is the thing being made.

The register spans every genre. A tech brand (Stripe, Linear, Vercel). A luxury brand (a hotel, a fashion house). A consumer product (a restaurant, a travel site, a CPG packaging page). A creative studio, an agency portfolio, a band's album page. They all share the stance (communicate, not transact) and diverge wildly in aesthetic. Don't collapse them into a single look.

The brand slop test

If someone could look at this and say "AI made that" without hesitation, it's failed. The bar is distinctiveness; a visitor should ask "how was this made?", not "which AI made this?"

Brand isn't a neutral register. AI-generated landing pages have flooded the internet, and average is no longer findable. Restraint without intent now reads as mediocre, not refined. Brand surfaces need a POV, a specific audience, a willingness to risk strangeness. Go big or go home.

The second slop test: aesthetic lane. Before committing to moves, name the reference. A Klim-style specimen page is one lane; Stripe-minimal is another; Liquid-Death-acid-maximalism is another. Don't drift into editorial-magazine aesthetics on a brief that isn't editorial. A hiking brand with Cormorant italic drop caps has the wrong register within the register.

Then the inverse test: in one sentence, describe what you're about to build the way a competitor would describe theirs. If that sentence fits the modal landing page in the category, restart.

Typography

Font selection procedure

Every project. Never skip.

1. Read the brief. Write three concrete brand-voice words. Not "modern" or "elegant," but "warm and mechanical and opinionated" or "calm and clinical and careful." Physical-object words.
2. List the three fonts you'd reach for by reflex. If any appear in the reflex-reject list below, reject them; they are training-data defaults and they create monoculture.
3. Browse a real catalog (Google Fonts, Pangram Pangram, Future Fonts, Adobe Fonts, ABC Dinamo, Klim, Velvetyne) with the three words in mind. Find the font for the brand as a physical object: a museum caption, a 1970s terminal manual, a fabric label, a cheap-newsprint children's book, a concert poster, a receipt from a mid-century diner. Reject the first thing that "looks designy."
4. Cross-check. "Elegant" is not necessarily serif. "Technical" is not necessarily sans. "Warm" is not Fraunces. If the final pick lines up with the original reflex, start over.

Reflex-reject list

Training-data defaults. Ban list. Look further:

Fraunces · Newsreader · Lora · Crimson · Crimson Pro · Crimson Text · Playfair Display · Cormorant · Cormorant Garamond · Syne · IBM Plex Mono · IBM Plex Sans · IBM Plex Serif · Space Mono · Space Grotesk · Inter · DM Sans · DM Serif Display · DM Serif Text · Outfit · Plus Jakarta Sans · Instrument Sans · Instrument Serif

Reflex-reject aesthetic lanes

Parallel to the font list. Currently saturated aesthetic families that have flooded brand surfaces. If a brief lands in one of these lanes without a register reason that requires it (a literal magazine, a literal terminal, a literal industrial signage system), it's the second-order training reflex: the trap one tier deeper than picking a Fraunces font. Look further.

• Editorial-typographic. Display serif (often italic) + small mono labels + ruled separators + monochromatic restraint. Klim-influenced, magazine-cover affectation. By 2026, every Stripe-adjacent and Notion-adjacent brand has landed here. The fingerprint: three rule-separated columns, an italic Fraunces / Recoleta / Newsreader headline, lowercase track-spaced metadata, no imagery.

(More entries land here on the same cadence the font list updates. Brutalist-utility and acid-maximalism may join when they saturate. Removing entries when they fall back below saturation is also fine.)

The reflex-reject lists apply to new design choices. When the existing brand has already committed to a font or a lane as part of its identity, identity-preservation wins; variants on an existing surface don't second-guess what's already shipping. The reflex-reject lists are for greenfield decisions and for departure-mode variants in live.md.

Pairing and voice

Distinctive + refined is the goal. The specific shape depends on the brand:

• Editorial / long-form / luxury: display serif + sans body (a magazine shape).
• Tech / dev tools / fintech: one committed sans, usually; custom-tight tracking, strong weight contrast inside a single family.
• Consumer / food / travel: warmer pairings, often a humanist sans plus a script or display serif.
• Creative studios / agencies: rule-breaking welcome. Mono-only, or display-only, or custom-drawn type as voice.

Two families minimum is the rule only when the voice needs it. A single well-chosen family with committed weight/size contrast is stronger than a timid display+body pair.

Vary across projects. If the last brief was a serif-display landing page, this one isn't.

Scale

Modular scale, fluid clamp() for headings, ≥1.25 ratio between steps. Flat scales (1.1× apart) read as uncommitted.

Light text on dark backgrounds: add 0.05–0.1 to line-height. Light type reads as lighter weight and needs more breathing room.

Color

Brand surfaces have permission for Committed, Full palette, and Drenched strategies. Use them. A single saturated color spread across a hero is not excess; it's voice. A beige-and-muted-slate landing page ignores the register.

• Name a real reference before picking a strategy. "Klim Type Foundry #ff4500 orange drench", "Stripe purple-on-white restraint", "Liquid Death acid-green full palette", "Mailchimp yellow full palette", "Condé Nast Traveler muted navy restraint", "Vercel pure black monochrome". Unnamed ambition becomes beige.
• Palette IS voice. A calm brand and a restless brand should not share palette mechanics.
• When the strategy is Committed or Drenched, color carries the brand. Don't hedge with neutrals around the edges. Commit.
• Don't converge across projects. If the last brand surface was restrained-on-cream, this one is not.
• When a cultural-symbol palette is the obvious pull, reach past it. Let the cultural reading come from typography, imagery, and copy, not the palette.

Layout

• Asymmetric compositions are one option. Break the grid intentionally for emphasis.
• Fluid spacing with clamp() that breathes on larger viewports. Vary for rhythm: generous separations, tight groupings.
• Alternative: a strict, visible grid as the voice (brutalist / Swiss / tech-spec aesthetics). Either asymmetric or rigorously-gridded can be "designed"; the failure mode is splitting the difference into a generic centered stack.
• Don't default to centering everything. Left-aligned with asymmetric layouts feels more designed; a strict grid reads as confident structure. A centered-stack hero with icon-title-subtitle cards reads as template.
• When cards ARE the right affordance, use grid-template-columns: repeat(auto-fit, minmax(280px, 1fr)) for breakpoint-free responsiveness.

Imagery

Brand surfaces lean on imagery. A restaurant, hotel, magazine, or product landing page without any imagery reads as incomplete, not as restrained. A solid-color rectangle where a hero image should go is worse than a representative stock photo.

When the brief implies imagery (restaurants, hotels, magazines, photography, hobbyist communities, food, travel, fashion, product), you must ship imagery. Zero images is a bug, not a design choice. "Restraint" is not an excuse. If the approved comp or brief is image-led, ship real project assets, generated raster assets, or a credible canvas/SVG/WebGL scene. Do not replace photographic, architectural, product, or place imagery with generic CSS panels, decorative diagrams, cards, bullets, or copy.

• For greenfield work without local assets, use stock imagery. Unsplash is the default. The URL shape is https://images.unsplash.com/photo-{id}?auto=format&fit=crop&w=1600&q=80. Verify the URLs before referencing them. If you have an image-search MCP, web-fetch tool, or browser access, use it to find real photo IDs and confirm they resolve. Guessed IDs (even ones that look real) often 404 and ship as broken-image placeholders. Without a verification path, pick fewer photos you're confident exist over more that you guessed; never substitute colored <div> placeholders.
• Search for the brand's physical object, not the generic category: "handmade pasta on a scratched wooden table" beats "Italian food"; "cypress trees above a limestone hotel facade at dusk" beats "luxury hotel".
• One decisive photo beats five mediocre ones. Hero imagery should commit to a mood; padding with more stock doesn't rescue an indecisive one.
• Alt text is part of the voice. "Coastal fettuccine, hand-cut, served on the terrace" beats "pasta dish".

"Imagery" here is broader than stock photography: product screenshots, custom data visualizations, generated SVG, and canvas/WebGL scenes are all imagery. Text-only pages where typography alone carries the entire visual weight are the failure mode.

Motion

• One well-orchestrated page-load with staggered reveals beats scattered micro-interactions, when the brand invites it. Tech-minimal brands often skip entrance motion entirely; the restraint is the voice.
• For collapsing/expanding sections, transition grid-template-rows rather than height.

Brand bans (on top of the shared absolute bans)

• Monospace as lazy shorthand for "technical / developer." If the brand isn't technical, mono reads as costume.
• Large rounded-corner icons above every heading. Screams template.
• Single-family pages that picked the family by reflex, not voice. (A single family chosen deliberately is fine.)
• All-caps body copy. Reserve caps for short labels and headings.
• Timid palettes and average layouts. Safe = invisible.
• Zero imagery on a brief that implies imagery (restaurant, hotel, food, travel, fashion, photography, hobbyist). Colored blocks where a hero photo belongs.
• Defaulting to editorial-magazine aesthetics (display serif + italic + drop caps + broadsheet grid) on briefs that aren't magazine-shaped. Editorial is ONE aesthetic lane, not the default brand aesthetic.
• Repeated tiny uppercase tracked labels above every section heading. A single strong kicker can be voice; repeating it as section grammar is AI scaffolding unless it's a deliberate, named brand system.

Brand permissions

Brand can afford things product can't. Take them.

• Ambitious first-load motion. Reveals, scroll-triggered transitions, typographic choreography.
• Single-purpose viewports. One dominant idea per fold, long scroll, deliberate pacing.
• Typographic risk. Enormous display type, unexpected italic cuts, mixed cases, hand-drawn headlines, a single oversize word as a hero.
• Unexpected color strategies. Palette IS voice; a calm brand and a restless brand should not share palette mechanics.
• Art direction per section. Different sections can have different visual worlds if the narrative demands it. Consistency of voice beats consistency of treatment.