Apple Hig Branding

---
name: apple-hig-branding
description: Use when expressing a brand through an Apple-platform interface, or reviewing branded colors, typography, language, logos, and customized controls.
---

# Express the brand without displacing the task

Read [Branding](../../references/branding.md). Inspect brand assets, product voice, actual screen hierarchy, and the requested design/review/adaptation scope. Identify what a person is trying to do and which identity cues genuinely help recognize this product. The decision inventory below is application advice; use the guide for Apple's stated constraints.

Separate identity from interaction convention. Preserve familiar navigation, control meaning, size, and behavior while choosing a distinctive tone, accent, content treatment, or heading style. If a proposal replaces a conventional symbol or moves a familiar action solely for branding, restore the convention and express character elsewhere.

Choose where emphasis belongs. Reserve accent color for meaningful actions/states; richer brand imagery may live in scrolling content rather than every glass control. If a custom font is essential, retain it where it remains legible under supported sizes, Bold Text, and text enlargement; use compatible system body/caption typography when needed. Remove repeated logos that displace useful content. A launch screen should provide startup continuity; a substantive brand introduction belongs in a welcome/onboarding moment. Check supplied app names/images for prohibited Apple marks rather than treating marketing branding as automatic trademark permission.

**Worked transformation:** Before, a bakery app replaces Back with its croissant logo, repeats a large wordmark over each list, and colors every button orange. Decision: navigation needs familiar meaning and orders need priority. After, a conventional Back control returns, the wordmark appears only where identification matters, warm photography supplies personality, and orange emphasizes the primary order action.

Deliver the revised screen/copy/token decisions or implementation, tying each brand change to a task consequence. Fail if the main content loses space to repeated identity, equivalent controls behave differently, or the custom font cannot expose a required label at supported settings. Call font/device/rendering checks pending when only static evidence exists.

Use [Typography](../apple-hig-typography/SKILL.md) for custom-font accommodation, [Color](../apple-hig-color/SKILL.md) for accent semantics, or [App icons](../apple-hig-app-icons/SKILL.md) when the identity surface is a launcher icon.