Brand Identity — Define the Foundation, Not the Pixels

This skill emits the brand book — logo brief, color system, type system, usage rules — and a machine-readable design-tokens.json that design consumes. You write the rules every later pixel must obey; you do not paint the live UI.

A brand identity with nothing checkable behind it is a mood board. The bar here is a brand book that compiles: roles named, every color carrying four channels, contrast pairs proven against WCAG, and a tokens file that scripts/verify.sh can validate.

All four parts ship together — logo brief, color system, type system, usage guidelines with the tokens export. A part missing its bar is incomplete, not "lite".

The one-line boundary test: "define what our brand looks like everywhere" → here. "make this surface look premium" → design.

Logo brief

Specify a system, not a single picture. The mark must survive from favicon to billboard, in color and in one ink.

• Variation set — primary (horizontal lockup), stacked (vertical, for square/tight slots), mark-only (the symbol alone, for avatars/favicons), monochrome (single-ink: black, white-knockout). A logo with no mono version fails the moment it lands on a colored background or a fax. Test the mono version first; if it dies in one color, the design is too fragile.
• Clear space — define it relative to the mark, not in fixed px, so it scales: clear space = the cap-height (or x-height of the mark) on all four sides. Nothing intrudes inside it.
• Minimum size — below this, detail collapses. Defaults: 24px wide digital, 10mm wide print for the full lockup; the mark-only may go smaller (favicon).
• File + favicon matrix — ship the formats below. SVG is the digital primary (scales, tiny); PNG carries transparency; JPEG is print-safe; 72 DPI digital / 300 DPI print.

Asset	Format	Notes
Logo (digital primary)	SVG	Vector, scales infinitely, smallest
Logo (raster, transparency)	PNG	@1x/@2x, transparent bg
Logo (print)	JPEG/PDF	300 DPI, CMYK
Favicon (modern)	favicon.svg	<1KB, can embed prefers-color-scheme for dark mode
Favicon (legacy fallback)	favicon.ico	At site root
Favicon PNG	favicon-16.png, favicon-32.png	Tab/bookmark
Apple touch	apple-touch-icon.png 180×180	iOS home screen
Android	android-chrome-192.png, -512.png	PWA/manifest
Manifest	site.webmanifest	Declares the icon set

Full variation grid, clear-space/min-size formulas, and the favicon HTML markup + prefers-color-scheme SVG snippet → references/logo-and-assets.md.

Color system

Assign roles first, values second. A color with no role is decoration waiting to be misused.

• Role taxonomy — 2–3 primary (the brand's signature), 2–3 secondary (support), a neutral ramp (text, surfaces, borders), and exactly one accent reserved for CTAs/highlights. One accent keeps "click here" unambiguous.
• Four channels, every color, no exceptions — HEX (web), RGB (screen math), CMYK (print), OKLCH (perceptual + wide-gamut). This one is absolute because a HEX-only palette silently breaks the two places nobody tests: print (no CMYK) and wide-gamut screens (no OKLCH). The W3C Design Tokens Color Module (2025.10) supports CSS Color 4 spaces including OKLCH and Display P3, so wide-gamut color lives in the token file natively — author in OKLCH and let HEX be the fallback.
• AA contrast pairing — every text-on-background pair you document clears WCAG 2 AA: 4.5:1 normal text, 3:1 large text (≥18.66px bold or ≥24px). Not negotiable — it is a conformance threshold, not a taste call, and shipping under it ships an inaccessible product. AAA is 7:1 / 4.5:1 — reach for it on body text where you can. Pair colors explicitly ("fg on bg: 12.4:1 ✓").
• Logo-text exemption caveat — WCAG 1.4.3 exempts logos and brand-name text from the contrast minimums. But a typed sub-brand or tagline that is plain text (not a graphical logo) IS subject to text-contrast rules. Mark logo-only tokens exempt; hold everything else to 4.5:1.
• Light/dark roles — define the role in both schemes from day one (bg/fg invert, brand stays anchored). Retrofitting dark mode onto a light-only palette produces muddy, low-contrast surfaces.

Full role taxonomy, a fully worked palette in HEX/RGB/CMYK/OKLCH, the contrast-pair matrix with computed ratios, and the dark-mode token strategy → references/color-and-tokens.md.

Type system

Two to three typefaces, no more. Most brands need exactly two: one display (headlines, personality) and one text (body, ≤16px legibility); a third is justified only for monospace/data.

• Scale — pick a modular ratio (1.2 minor third for dense UI, 1.25 major third for marketing) and ladder the sizes from it. Document the ladder; do not re-guess sizes per screen.
• Weights — name which weights ship (e.g. 400 body, 500 UI, 600/700 display) and which are banned (no faux-bold, no faux-italic).
• Pairing rationale — one line on why the pair works (contrast in structure: a geometric sans display over a humanist text face; or a serif display over a neutral sans body). "They both look nice" is not a rationale.
• Variable-font note — prefer a variable font where available: one file spans the weight axis, cuts requests, and removes the faux-bold temptation. Pin the named instances you use.

Emit the tokens (the hand-off contract)

Ship design-tokens.json even when the client only asked for a PDF — it is the one artifact design can read, and without it the palette gets re-derived by eye and drifts. Use the W3C Design Tokens format, which reached its first stable version (2025.10) on 2025-10-28 — a vendor-neutral JSON for sharing design decisions, with light/dark and multi-brand themes via group inheritance / $extends.

{
  "$schema": "https://tokens.designtokens.org/2025.10/schema.json",
  "color": {
    "brand": {
      "$type": "color",
      "primary": {
        "$value": { "colorSpace": "oklch", "components": [0.55, 0.19, 256], "hex": "#3b5bdb" }
      },
      "accent": {
        "$value": { "colorSpace": "oklch", "components": [0.72, 0.17, 50], "hex": "#f08c00" }
      }
    },
    "bg": { "$type": "color", "$value": { "colorSpace": "oklch", "components": [0.99, 0, 0], "hex": "#fcfcfc" } },
    "fg": { "$type": "color", "$value": { "colorSpace": "oklch", "components": [0.21, 0.01, 256], "hex": "#1f2430" } }
  }
}

Map the tokens to CSS custom properties (and, if the consumer is Tailwind v4, an @theme block) so the values flow into utilities — author once, consume everywhere:

/* design consumes these — generated from design-tokens.json, never hand-edited */
:root {
  --color-brand-primary: oklch(0.55 0.19 256);
  --color-brand-accent:  oklch(0.72 0.17 50);
  --color-bg:            oklch(0.99 0 0);
  --color-fg:            oklch(0.21 0.01 256);
}

Full tokens file with light/dark via $extends, the Tailwind v4 @theme mapping, and the dark-mode strategy → references/color-and-tokens.md.

Usage guidelines + anti-patterns

State the misuse rules explicitly — the gap a brand book exists to close is the well-meaning teammate who stretches the logo to fit.

Misuse in the wild	Why it breaks / Fix
"Stretch the logo to fill the space"	Non-uniform scaling distorts the mark. Lock aspect ratio; pick the variation that fits (stacked vs primary).
"This blue is close enough"	Off-palette colors fracture recognition. Use the token; if a need is unmet, add a role, don't eyeball one.
"HEX is enough, we're a web brand"	Print and wide-gamut break. Every color carries HEX + RGB + CMYK + OKLCH or it is not in the system.
"Four fonts give us range"	Reads as chaos and bloats load. Cap at 2–3; get range from weights + scale.
"We'll add dark mode later"	Light-only palettes go muddy when inverted. Define light/dark roles from day one.
"Contrast is a design detail"	It is a WCAG requirement. Document each text/bg pair at ≥4.5:1 before shipping.
"Drop the logo on any background"	Color/photo backgrounds kill legibility. Provide and require the mono/knockout variation with clear space.
"The tokens file is optional, the PDF is the brand"	A PDF can't be consumed by code; design will drift. The design-tokens.json is the contract.

Do/don't rules, the full misuse grid with examples, and lockup rules → references/logo-and-assets.md.

Verify

The skill emits a checkable artifact, so verify it before claiming done. Run against your tokens file:

./scripts/verify.sh path/to/design-tokens.json

It checks: the file parses as JSON; required color roles are present (primary, neutral, accent at minimum); every color token carries a HEX value; and, for each documented text/background pair (declared via $extensions["com.risco.contrast"] pairs), it computes the WCAG relative-luminance contrast ratio and fails any normal-text pair below 4.5:1. Logo-only tokens are exempt. On an empty or clean target it exits 0 — no false failures.

Boundary + hand-off

Request	Route to	Why
Tone of voice, tagline, naming, messaging pillars	../brand-voice/SKILL.md	Verbal identity — the words, not the pixels. Pair it with this so copy and visuals agree.
Make this page premium, pick layout + motion, ship the Tailwind	../design/SKILL.md	The applied UI layer: it reads design-tokens.json and builds the accessible, fast UI. This skill produces the brand study's visual half that design STOPS without.
Hero headline, value prop, CTA copy	../marketing/SKILL.md	Page words, not the visual system.
Press kit — boilerplate, logos-for-press, fact sheet	../press-kit/SKILL.md	Media packaging of finished assets, not system definition.
Investor pitch deck visuals	../presentations/SKILL.md	Deck composition consuming the tokens, not the brand foundation.