Your brand guide becomes your kit

Most companies already have a brand guide. Someone paid for it, it runs to forty or sixty pages, and it says exactly how the logo may be placed, which greens are for print and which are internal, how headlines are set and what the photos should feel like. Then it sits in a folder, and every new tool asks you to start over by typing in two hex codes and a font name.

We think the guide should be the starting point, not something you translate by hand. So that is how ANVL works now.

Upload the guide, keep talking

During onboarding there is a button under the address field: upload your brand guide as a PDF or a Word file, or drop it into the conversation. It is read in the background while you carry on, and what the guide says is taken as given. The conversation only asks about what is missing.

A guide is read as what it is, the decisions behind an identity, not as a website. That means:

• The whole palette, with names, roles and print values (CMYK and Pantone). Colours the guide marks as internal never become your communication colours.
• The colour rules: which pairs are allowed, checked against contrast requirements, how the colours should balance, and which combinations are forbidden.
• The typography: weights per role, letter spacing and line height, the hierarchy and the fallback fonts.
• The logo, layout and imagery: clear space, minimum size, placement, margins and grid, the photo style with its dos and don'ts.
• The tone and the words you actually use.
• Do and don't, chapter by chapter.

Example copy is only taken if the guide contains it. Nothing is made up to fill a gap. Files can be up to 40 MB, because a real guide usually is: the pictures are heavy even when the text is short.

A rule is something you can check

Reading a guide is the easy half. The hard half is that most of what a guide says is a rule, not a value. "Our primary colour carries the surface." "Never mix the accent with the secondary colours." "Headlines are never set in capitals." A model told those things will follow them most of the time, which in practice means not reliably.

So ANVL checks them in the finished material, not just in the instructions:

• Colour balance is measured. Every rendered slide, post or poster is measured against your palette. If the guide says the primary colour should carry the surface and the result came out mostly white, it is redone with the primary colour carrying it. A deck is judged as a whole, so a deliberate white pause between coloured slides is allowed to stay.
• Forbidden pairs stay apart. If your guide says two colours must never meet, generation swaps such a surface for an approved one, and the brand check points out anything that still ends up there.
• Your own typefaces everywhere. Font files you have added are used when material is shown, presented, printed and exported, and the check tells you when one cannot be displayed.
• The type follows the guide level by level: letter spacing and line height for headlines, body text and buttons, set in the material itself.
• A logo that carries its own colour keeps it on a dark background instead of being swapped for the white version.

Filling the gaps

A guide rarely covers everything ANVL can use. The brand page now opens on what is missing: one empty section at a time, with a progress bar and "Save and continue". Everything advanced is folded away until you want it.

It works on a phone too. One column, each section as its own view, and the save buttons fixed at the bottom. The examples of how you write sit under Tone of voice, as pairs of "we write like this" and "we don't write like this", so the AI gets both sides right.

Why it matters

If you are evaluating ANVL: "we read your brand guide" is easy to say. What it should mean is that the forty pages you already paid for decide what comes out, and that someone checks. Not a colour picker with your logo in the corner, but your rules, measured in every piece.