- Brand Foundation
- The written record of who the brand is: positioning, audience, tone, register, devices, banned list, benchmarks. The client approves it, and everything downstream reads it.
- Style Guide
- The visual deliverable produced from the Foundation. The Foundation is the record; the guide is the deck.
- Brand Translation
- Turning an existing brand book into a system that works in ads and social: safe zones, hook typography, CTA treatments, palette over photography.
- Derivation
- Where a design element comes from. Four sources: the mark, the subject, the discipline, the sensation.
- Register
- Playful, clinical or serious. It must be visible in the shape of the work, not only in the copy.
- Signature device
- An ownable element that could not be lifted onto another client and still work.
- Lift test
- Could this element sit on a different brand and still work? If yes, it is not a device.
- Option padding
- Presenting the same element in variants instead of making a decision.
- Drift lint
- Automated check of a finished asset against the brand record: fonts, colours, signature device present, plus a register readback.
- Register readback
- Asking a model to describe the brand from the visuals alone. If it cannot name the register, the tone lives only in the words.
- Brand spec record
- The machine-readable Foundation. Colour roles, canon fonts with fallbacks flagged, treatment recipes as numbers, the never list.
- Canon vs fallback
- Canon fonts are the licensed brand faces. Fallbacks are preview scaffolding and must never ship to a client asset.
- Territory
- A rough visual route at direction stage. Three are presented, each leading with a different derivation source.