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Docs / skills/showtime/references/crew/brand-designer.md

Crew brief: brand designer

Read this when you were dispatched as the brand designer of a showtime job (after references/crew/rules.md).

Your job: the look's raw material. A brand kit (references/brand-kit.md) the whole crew can build on, extracted from what the product already has or, when there is nothing, proposed and labelled as a proposal. In studio's look phase you also draw the look directions.

Task shapes#

A. Extract (or correct) a kit#

  1. When TASK.md gives a draft kit (the director usually runs brand init before the pitch round), copy it into your folder and correct the copy. Otherwise draft one from the source TASK.md names. A repo: showtime brand init --from <repo> -o <own dir>/brand.json. A site: showtime brand init --url <url> -o <own dir>/brand.json, or, when the job already has a capture, showtime brand init --site-json <capture>/site.json -o <own dir>/brand.json (a capture is heavy: never run a second one). Always pass -o; without it the kit lands in the user's folder.
  2. Read what it found and fix it by hand where it guessed wrong, keeping each colour's source. The usual misses: accent taken from a pale tint (--brand-50) instead of the variable the buttons use (--accent, --primary); a tagline that is any README sentence instead of the hero line; generic words (URL, CSS, API) in pronunciation_candidates; a light theme only when the source also has a dark one (add the dark ground, ink and accent as extra colours with their sources).
  3. Logo: official files only, SVG preferred, with on_dark and on_light variants when they exist. Copy them into <own dir>/logo/, point logo.path at the copy and note the original path. Never redraw, trace or recolour a logo. No logo found: leave it empty and say so.
  4. Colours: fill the roles (bg surface ink muted accent ...). showtime brand show <own dir> warns about a failing pair but lists nothing when all pass, so write contrast.txt yourself: every text pair the video will use (ink, muted, accent and white-on-accent, on each ground) with its WCAG ratio and a verdict against references/color.md section 3. A text pair under 4.5:1 gets a fix (a darker variable from the source, like an --accent-text) or a note saying it is for shapes and large type.
  5. Fonts: install each with showtime assets font "<family>". A brand font that is not free to embed stays out: pick the nearest OFL face, and state the substitution in brand.md.
  6. Pronunciations: list product and people names a voice engine may misread under pronunciation_candidates (the voice director resolves them).

B. Create a kit (nothing to extract)#

A proposal, never presented as the brand: palette roles, an OFL type pairing, at most a typeset wordmark (the product name set in the display face) marked proposed, "status": "draft". Explain the choices in three lines in brand.md (why this ground, this accent, this pairing for this tone).

C. Look directions (studio)#

Three looks of the picked concept, L1 to L3, each differing from the others on at least two of: ground (dark, light, photo), type family, density, motion character. For each, one style-frame page (l1.html ...) in a small project (showtime new dom <own dir>/comps --duration 3), built from the kit's tokens and real captures, checked with showtime snap <own dir>/comps --page l1.html --at <t> (one frame per look unless TASK.md allows more) and looked at. Write looks.md: per look the id, a one-line idea, the tokens it changes, what it suits, the risk. Recommend one.

Deliver#

In your task folder only (never the repo root, never <job>/brand.json, which the director copies): brand.json, brand.md, contrast.txt, logo/, and for looks looks.md + the comps/ pages.

Done when: showtime brand show on your kit reports no missing files, every colour and font has a source or is marked proposed, and contrast issues are fixed or noted.

Never#

  • A logo you drew, traced or pulled from a search result instead of the product's own files.
  • Fonts referenced by system name; every face is an installed file.
  • A second site capture when one exists.

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