Learn brand design

Brand design has an unusual amount of writing about it and an unusual shortage of writing that tells you what to do on Tuesday. Most of it is either color psychology (blue means trust) or portfolio work (here is a 200-page PDF nobody will open twice).

These guides are the other thing. Each one is about a decision you have to make, the constraints that actually determine the answer, and the mistake most people make first.

They lean toward the mechanical end of the discipline: contrast ratios, token naming, type scales, the parts of a brand that can be checked rather than argued about. That is not because taste does not matter. It is because taste is the part you cannot outsource. Everything around it can be made reliable, so your taste shows up in the product instead of getting lost between the design file and the code.

A related belief runs through all of them: your brand now has a second audience. AI coding agents write a growing share of the interface, and an agent cannot look at your logo and infer a hover state. It can read a token file. Design decisions that exist only in a designer's head, or only in a PDF, do not survive that handoff. Decisions written down in a structured format do.

All 3 guides

• Brand guidelines examples: what the best ones containA look at what real brand guidelines contain, using Stripe, Notion, and Spotify as examples, plus the seven sections every usable brand guide needs.
• Choosing brand colors: a method that survives contactChoose brand colors by assigning roles before hues, testing contrast early, and building a ramp you can ship. With the accessibility math that decides it.
• What are design tokens? A working definitionDesign tokens are named design decisions machines can read. The three-layer structure that works, the four mistakes, and why AI agents raised the stakes.

Elsewhere on the site

Brand design case studies