Who this is for: Brand owners, creative directors and producers onboarding collaborators.
What to prepare
- Approved identity assets and usage rules
- Brand attributes translated into observable behaviors
- Representative text, diagram and logo specimens
- Brand owner and final approval responsibilities
Copyable creative brief
An authored planning example. Replace illustrative details with your approved product facts and assets.
Illustrative job: teach a fictional educational brand's composed, curious and precise movement. Define composed as one active emphasis at a time, curious as whole-before-detail explanation and precise as a stable final alignment. Produce a 30-second outline for one rule, plus a reusable decision card for all three. Use approved fonts, palette and logo assets. Show the same specimen in an approved pass, a clearly labeled counterexample and a corrected pass. Change only the property being taught. Deliver exact behavior criteria, still reference frames, exception notes and named approval fields. The tone mappings are creative choices for this example, not universal laws or a claim of audience-tested performance.
Make it your own
- BRAND_ATTRIBUTES
- Supply the desired qualities and their intended meaning.
- BEHAVIOR_RULES
- Map each quality to entrance, transition or settling behavior.
- SPECIMENS
- Choose representative content and fixed comparison conditions.
- EXCEPTIONS
- Define when communication needs justify another treatment.
Use guidelines when decisions repeat
This job suits teams producing several assets with recurring content roles. It is less useful when the identity is still unresolved or when stakeholders have supplied only adjectives with no agreed interpretation. Start by comparing a few concrete behaviors and deciding what the brand intends.
Choose specimens beyond a large decorative logo: a heading, a diagram label and a dense reference note expose different requirements. A motion rule that works only on empty backgrounds may not serve the content team.
Write the behavior and counterexample
A useful rule reads “the heading settles before supporting copy becomes the reading target.” Its counterexample keeps the heading drifting while the copy appears. Both use identical words and composition so the violation is clear.
An unhelpful counterexample changes color, copy, camera, sound and timing at once. That makes it impossible to know what the rule prohibits. Label the example as a counterexample rather than allowing collaborators to mistake it for an approved creative variant.
Create a reusable decision card
Include these fields: object, communication purpose, active movement, protected reading region, resting state, exception and approval owner. For a traveling marker, the exception may allow continuous motion because travel explains order, while its labels remain fixed.
Keep clear-space and logo rules sourced from the identity owner. Do not invent a universal margin or alter a wordmark to fit an animation. Store exact font and asset versions beside the approved specimens so another producer can reproduce the intended treatment.
Review and maintain the guidance
Have the brand owner approve behaviors and exceptions, then inspect real encoded examples for readability and collisions. A source setting is not proof of the final behavior. When a new format exposes a gap, update the rule with an example rather than adding an unexplained exception.
This page describes a useful planning and review job; it does not promise automatic guideline import or a finished brand system. Keep the approved rule sheet portable and explicit.
Review checklist
- Brand adjectives map to observable rules.
- Counterexamples isolate one relevant violation.
- Identity assets retain approved treatment.
- The decision card includes purpose, exception and owner.