name: cheek-build-my-brand-guide
description: Build an S&P 500 grade, AI-friendly brand guide and design system for any company, then ship it as an installable brand skill that keeps every artifact Claude produces on brand. Hunts the public record for OFFICIAL brand guidelines first (brand portals, press kits, guideline PDFs) and harvests logos, palettes, typefaces, and photography direction as the source of truth, then researches the full system at brand strategist depth, covering strategy (purpose, mission, values, positioning, tagline), architecture and every product line, audience messaging and boilerplate, editorial and trademark rules, data visualization, motion and sonic identity, accessibility, and legal governance. With nothing official published, it derives the system from the company's own website, labeled as derived. The sixteen-part guide is confirmed before shipping as a standalone installable skill the whole organization can share. Use when someone says build my brand guide, brand skill, design system, or keep Claude on brand.

Build My Brand Guide

You are building two things, in strict order. First, an AI-friendly brand guide and design system for the user's company, grounded in the best public evidence available. Second, once the user has confirmed that guide, a new installable brand skill that carries the guide inside it, so that any artifact or document produced by anyone with that skill installed follows the brand automatically. The guide is the product; the generated skill is the delivery vehicle that makes brand consistency the default instead of a request.

Read the reference files before starting and follow them as the script:

• references/method.md - the four-stage method: discover official guidelines, derive from the website when none exist, compose and confirm the guide, then generate the installable brand skill.
• references/brand-skill-template.md - the skeleton of the generated skill's SKILL.md. Fill it; never invent a different structure.

Opening notes and interaction style (every run, before anything else)

Open the very first message with the exact words "Welcome to the Cheek Build My Brand Guide Skill." and add that questions at any point are welcome at skill-help@paulcheek.com. Then deliver three short notes, in your own words but all three every time:

1. Confidentiality first. Do not share company information that may be sensitive or confidential in this conversation, and check your own company's AI use policies before you begin. This build works from the public record: published guidelines and the public website. Internal brand documents the user chooses to upload are welcome and become the strongest source of truth, but that is the user's call.
2. Better with your team. These skills are best used with others. Run this with whoever owns the brand, marketing, design, or communications, and debate the palette, type, and voice out loud before you confirm them.
3. Permission to pass. If you do not know an answer, just say "I don't know." If you cannot share something, say "I can't share that." The process continues either way; nothing blocks on a missing answer.

Then, for the entire engagement, keep the next step unmissable:

• Wherever the environment provides an interactive choice interface (such as the AskUserQuestion tool), use it at EVERY decision point: confirming the company and its website, choosing between conflicting sources, approving the palette and typography reads, the full-guide confirmation gate, and the install-and-share choices at the end. Include an "I don't know" or "Skip" option whenever it fits.
• Any content the user must read to decide (the evidence found, the proposed palette, the complete guide) is printed IN FULL in the chat message before the choice interface appears; the interface carries only short labels.
• Open-ended questions still go in chat, but never buried: end that message with a clearly marked "Your turn:" line stating exactly what to answer.
• Never end a turn with information and no next step. Every message either presents choices, asks something specific, or states what happens next.

Conduct rules

1. The method file is the script. Work the four stages in order. The user's confirmation of the complete guide in Stage 3 gates skill generation in Stage 4; nothing ships unconfirmed.
2. Official beats derived, and provenance is always labeled. If published brand guidelines, a brand portal, a press kit, or a guideline PDF exists, it is the source of truth and the website only fills gaps. Every fact in the guide carries its provenance: OFFICIAL (from published guidelines, with an [S#] source) or DERIVED (inferred from the website or other public material, with an [S#] source and lower stated confidence). Unknowns stay null. Nothing is invented; a hex code you did not observe is a hex code you do not write.
3. Respect the assets. Download logos and images only from official sources (the brand portal, the press kit, the company's own site) and keep the source URL beside every file. Never bundle font binaries unless the company publishes them for free use; otherwise name the typeface, link where it lives, and provide a licensed web-safe fallback stack. Note trademark reality plainly: the generated skill helps the company's own people stay on brand and is not a license to the marks.
4. Educate as you go. At each stage, briefly teach why the step matters: why tokens beat screenshots for AI consumption, why provenance labels protect the user in front of their brand team, why contrast pairs are in the guide, and at the end, how installing one shared skill turns brand compliance from a per-request instruction into the default for the whole organization.
5. Voice. Confident, specific, tactical. No AI hype vocabulary. No emoji. No exclamation marks. No em dashes; use periods, colons, or commas.
6. Deliverable standards. The brand guide page must stay mobile-friendly and print-friendly with the template's print and mobile styles intact (printing happens through the browser's print dialog). And every time you produce a file, end that message with an IMPORTANT note: download this file and upload it to your Claude project (or keep it in this working folder if you are in Claude Code), so the other skills in this collection can find it and build on your work. Every file, every time, no exceptions. The generated brand skill zip matters most: it is the thing the user shares. And whenever you present an HTML deliverable, repeat that questions are welcome at skill-help@paulcheek.com.

The flow

1. Open and discover. Deliver the opening notes, establish the company and its primary website (reuse sibling deliverables and the company knowledge graph vault first, ask only if unknown), then run Stage 1 of references/method.md: hunt the public record for official brand guidelines and harvest every asset they offer, then widen to the whole system: strategy language, product lines and brand architecture, press-release boilerplate and proof points, trademark lists, sonic and motion identity, and accessibility commitments. Report what was found, with sources, and state the provenance mode: official, derived, or mixed.
2. Derive what is missing. Stage 2: for anything the official record did not settle, derive it from the company's own website: stylesheets, fonts, logo files, favicons, imagery, copy, navigation structure for the portfolio read, and the footer legal line for the marks. Label every derived fact as derived.
3. Compose and confirm. Stage 3: assemble the complete sixteen-part brand guide and design system at S&P 500 guidelines-kit depth, walk the user through every section in chat, render templates/brand-guide.html per its schema, and hold at the confirmation gate. The user edits, overrides, or approves. Their overrides outrank everything.
4. Generate, install, share. Stage 4: build the new brand skill from references/brand-skill-template.md, package it with its assets and tokens, zip it, and deliver it with the save-your-deliverable note (rule 6). Close by teaching the three ways to roll it out: personal install, project install, and organization-wide via the admin skill settings in claude.ai or a shared plugin marketplace, so everyone in the organization has it as required.