Brand Style

Northlight Brand Style

Every file that leaves this workspace and could be seen by a colleague, client, or board member should look like Northlight made it. That is the whole job of this skill: turn "a document" into "a Northlight document" without the user having to ask.

Source of truth: assets/tokens.json. The palette, fonts, and logo files are loaded from it — never paste hex codes into a builder.

Apply by default

Brand these without being asked: .docx .pptx .xlsx .pdf .html and any chart or image that will be embedded in them.

Leave these alone: .md .py .json .yaml .csv .txt, source code, and config files. They're plumbing, not deliverables. If a Markdown file is a draft that will become a Word doc or deck, brand the final artifact, not the draft.

The only reason to skip branding on a supported format is the user explicitly saying so ("plain," "no branding," "unstyled"). Don't ask permission first; produce the branded version and mention it in one line at the end.

The rules that matter most

These are the ones that get violated, in the order they get violated. Each has a number because scripts/brand_check.py enforces it by that number.

1. R1 — Body text is Ink #2B2B2B, never pure black. The guide names one text color and that's it.
2. R3/R4 — The logo appears in full color, on a light surface. BRAND.logo("primary") is the default everywhere, and color artwork needs a light background — so design the surface around the logo, not the other way round. Title slides, closing slides, letterheads, and page headers are white or Paper #F7F7F5; brand presence comes from Blue headings plus a green/amber accent band. Don't reach for logo("reversed") to make a dark layout work — change the background. Reversed is the exception, for a dark photograph or a supplied template you can't alter.
3. R4 — Never put the color logo on a saturated fill. Blue or Green behind the primary artwork closes up the mark's white channels and kills the wordmark. If a surface must be saturated (section dividers), leave the logo off entirely rather than knocking it out.
4. Never modify the logo — no stretching, recoloring, dropping the wordmark, adding shadows. Use the bundled files as-is and set one dimension so the aspect ratio is preserved. Minimum 1 inch wide.
5. Stone #7A7A78 is for physical swag. In documents it's acceptable for captions and footers only — never as a chart or accent color when a primary color would do.
6. R6 — The tint palette is for fills, never for type. #DCE8F5 text on white is unreadable.
7. R5 — Charts follow the series order in BRAND.CHART_SERIES (blue → green → amber → lilac → rose → clay). Don't let Office pick.

Locate the toolkit first

The tokens, logo artwork, and builder scripts ship alongside this file. Normally they sit right next to it in the installed skill directory; they may instead live in a working folder. Locate them before doing anything else:

import glob, os, sys

ROOTS = [os.path.expanduser("~/.claude/skills"), os.getcwd(), "/tmp",
         *glob.glob("/sessions/*/mnt")]
# Depth-bounded globs rather than a recursive walk: skill caches nest deep and
# rglob over them is slow enough to feel broken. Fixed-depth globs never
# enumerate the whole tree.
found = [p for root in ROOTS for d in range(7)
         for p in glob.glob(os.path.join(root, *(["*"] * d), "brand-style",
                                         "scripts", "brand.py"))]
# The marker file is the test, not the directory name: some locations hold a
# copy of this SKILL.md with no assets beside it.
roots = sorted({os.path.dirname(os.path.dirname(p)) for p in found})
SKILL = roots[0]
sys.path.insert(0, SKILL + "/scripts")

A valid library has scripts/ (the builders + checker) and assets/ (tokens.json, logo-primary.png, logo-reversed.png).

If roots comes up empty, the toolkit isn't on this machine — say so plainly rather than improvising. You can still apply the palette by hex for HTML, but you cannot produce a properly branded Office file without the logo artwork. Quietly shipping default fonts and no logo is worse than telling the user the library is missing.

Treat the library as read-only; everything here writes only to the output path you're given.

How to build each format

All scripts live in scripts/. Every builder ends with finish(), which saves and then reopens the file — a malformed part fails at write time on your machine, not on the recipient's. Don't hand-roll a save().

Word

from brand_docx import new_document, finish, style_table, add_callout

doc = new_document("Quarterly Review", "Prepared for the board", "Q3")
doc.add_heading("Findings", 1)          # already Blue, heading family
doc.add_paragraph("Body copy.")          # already Ink at 11pt
add_callout(doc, "Key takeaway in a tinted box.")
t = doc.add_table(rows=2, cols=3); ...; style_table(t)
finish(doc, "out.docx")

new_document() rewrites the built-in styles, so plain python-docx calls come out branded. header="letterhead" (default) is a compact logo-rule-title block with no page break — right for memos and one-pagers. header="titlepage" adds the break for reports long enough to justify a cover.

PowerPoint

from brand_pptx import (new_deck, title_slide, section_slide, bullets_slide,
                        kpi_slide, chart_slide, closing_slide, content_slide, finish)

d = new_deck()                                    # 16:9
title_slide(d, "Quarterly Review", "Board of Directors", "Q3")
section_slide(d, "Where we stand", "Context")
bullets_slide(d, "Three things moved", ["Rate up 3 pts", ("detail", 1)])
kpi_slide(d, "The numbers", [("91%", "Rate"), ("13,910", "Sessions")])
chart_slide(d, "Sessions by quarter", ["Q1","Q2"], {"2026": [1200, 1310]})
closing_slide(d)
finish(d, "deck.pptx")

chart_slide() makes a native PowerPoint chart that stays editable — prefer it over pasting a matplotlib image. For anything custom, content_slide() returns (slide, content_top) with the branded header already drawn.

Title and closing slides are light with the color logo and a green band; section dividers are full-bleed Green with no logo. That alternation gives a deck rhythm — keep logo-bearing surfaces light and let saturated fills carry type only.

Excel

from brand_xlsx import add_title_block, style_sheet, finish

hr = add_title_block(ws, "Quarterly Rates", "Q3")   # returns the header row
style_sheet(ws, header_row=hr, number_format="#,##0")
finish(wb, "rates.xlsx")

Call add_title_block before style_sheet and pass the row it returns. Excel can't embed fonts; if exact typography matters, deliver a PDF too.

HTML, dashboards, and PDF

from brand_web import page, kpi, table, finish

html = page("Quarterly Dashboard", body_html, subtitle="Board review")

page() returns one self-contained file with the logo base64-embedded — no external requests, so it survives being emailed around. Use the .b-* classes (b-card, b-kpi, table.b) rather than inventing styling. For PDFs, build the HTML and print it (the stylesheet has a print block), or convert a .docx/.pptx.

Fonts

That last row is the gotcha that survives every brand: asking for the body family + bold gives you Bold, not Medium. Headings must name the heading family explicitly.

Licensing matters more than it looks. Inter is OFL — safe to bundle and embed. Many corporate fonts are preview-and-print licensed: embedding is permitted and files render correctly for recipients, but some Word builds open such files read-only. If a recipient reports a read-only file, that's the cause — disable embedding for editable drafts or send a PDF.

Palette

Primary      Blue #1F5AA6   Green #2E9E6B   Amber #F2B84B
Background   Paper #F7F7F5  Blue tint #DCE8F5  Green tint #D7EDE3  Amber tint #FBEFD2
Text         Ink #2B2B2B
Secondary    Clay #E8C9B0   Rose #E9B3B3   Lilac #CFC3E0
Swag only    Stone #7A7A78

Import from brand (BRAND.BLUE, BRAND.hex("BLUE"), BRAND.rgb("BLUE")) rather than pasting hex, so a palette correction propagates. Blue leads, green and amber support, secondary pastels accent. A document that is mostly blue-and-white with amber emphasis reads correctly; one that gives equal weight to all seven colors doesn't.

Voice, when writing the words too

Plain, warm, concrete. Write for the reader who has thirty seconds. Product names carry their mark on first use. The tagline is set in lowercase.

Before delivering

Cheap to fix, expensive to send:

• Any pure black #000000 text? Should be Ink.
• Is the logo the full color version, on a light background? A white knockout logo means a surface got built dark that shouldn't have.
• Color logo sitting on Blue or Green? Lighten the background or drop the logo.
• Logo distorted, or under 1 inch wide?
• Headings using the body family where the heading family was intended?
• Chart colors off the series order, or an Office default palette?
• Does the file actually open? finish() reopens it for you.

All of that is machine-checkable, and it is the gate:

python scripts/brand_check.py <directory-of-outputs>

It prints PASS/FAIL per file with the rule number that failed, writes grading.json beside the outputs, and exits non-zero if anything is off-brand. Run it on anything headed outside the organization.