Taste Brand

---
name: taste-brand
description: Defines positioning, personality, voice, tone, messaging and visual identity direction, then freezes them into brand-guidelines.md for every other Tastemaker skill. Use for "brand", "voice and tone", "messaging", "tagline", "brand guidelines", "copy feels generic", or as a 10-line Light pass before landing pages, banners and decks. Bans hype copy and imitation of real brands.
---

# Taste Brand: specific beats clever

Freeze who the product is, how it sounds and how it looks into `brand-guidelines.md`. Downstream skills read it and never re-invent it.

**Originality is mandatory**: never imitate a real brand's name, slogan, mark or distinctive visual signature. From a reference, extract abstract principles only ("geometric, calm, single accent").

## Modes

- **Light** (default for UI, banners, slides): fill the 10-line essentials below and write them to `brand-guidelines.md`.
- **Full** (explicit brand request): run all steps; produce the full guidelines from `references/guidelines-template.md`.

## Full procedure

1. **Discovery** (infer; ask max 3 questions): one-liner, audiences, category and alternative types, promise, proof points, tone constraints, locales, existing assets, no-go list. Output a 15-line Brand Brief.
2. **Positioning**: "For <audience> who <need>, <Brand> is the <category> that <benefit>, unlike <alternative type>, because <reason to believe>." Plus purpose, vision, mission, 3-5 values each with a behaviour example, max 3 differentiators each with evidence.
3. **Personality and voice**: sliders and principles in `references/voice-and-messaging.md`.
4. **Messaging**: tagline, value proposition, pitch, pillars, boilerplate, per-audience messages.
5. **Visual direction**: color, type, imagery, iconography, radius/elevation, motion, data-viz palette, each with one line of rationale tied to the sliders. Hand concrete values to taste-tokens.
6. **Consistency audit** on any deliverable (table in references); output fails with exact fixes, then apply them.

## Light essentials (10 lines)

```
Name / one-liner:
Audience:
Voice: <3 adjectives> | never: <3 banned traits>
Primary / accent / neutral + one verified contrast pair:
Heading / body font:
Radius + elevation language:
Icon style:
Imagery rule:
Tagline (original, passes competitor test):
Button verb pattern:
```

## Copy laws (apply everywhere)

- Competitor test: if a competitor could use the line unchanged, rewrite with specifics (audience, number, mechanism).
- No hype words (C01), no invented proof (C03), no "Welcome to" (C05).
- Buttons: verb + object. Errors: what, why, fix, no blame. Sentence case. No emoji. Numerals with units and locale formats.
- Inclusive, plain language; no idioms that do not translate.