Brand

Two jobs. The first is legal and boring and urgent: is the name actually yours? The second is a design system, which sounds like a luxury and is actually the thing that lets you produce a deck in an hour instead of a week.

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Name

Is the name defensible?

[TBD]

Check now, while changing it is cheap:

• Is the .com (and your local domain) available or owned?
• Does anyone else in any city trade under a similar name? Search properly — a similar business under a similar name three cities away will cause confusion and eventual conflict.
• Is it registrable as a trademark? Generic and descriptive names are hard to protect. "Prime Leather" or "AB Services" cannot really be defended; a distinctive coined name can.
• Does it survive being said aloud on a phone call?

The moment to fix a name is now, not later. Early it costs a weekend and some printing. Two years in it costs your search ranking, your reviews, your customer recognition, and every piece of collateral you own — and by then someone else may have filed the mark you needed.

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If you decide to keep a weak name, that is a legitimate choice — record the reasoning and the risk you have accepted, and file what protection you can.

Alternatives considered: [TBD]

Positioning

One sentence:

For [TBD — customer] who [TBD — situation], [TBD — name] is the [TBD — category] that [TBD — benefit]. Unlike [TBD — alternative], we [TBD — differentiator].

The three things a customer should remember:

1. [TBD]

2. [TBD]

3. [TBD]

What we are deliberately not: [TBD]

Voice

Words

Never say: [TBD]

Include claims you are not allowed to make — medical, financial, environmental, performance. See 04-product.

Write in the language your customer actually uses. In a local market, local-language creative routinely outperforms English by a wide margin, and founders default to English because that is the language they write proposals in. Test it rather than assuming.

Design system

Everything the AI needs to produce something on-brand without being told each time.

Do not invent this — sample it

If you have a website, your palette, typeface and logo are already specified there to the hex digit. Read the values off the live site rather than eyeballing "our blue." A near-miss palette reads as a template with your name on it; the exact values read as yours, before a single word lands.

site2deck automates this: it samples colours, fonts, logo and icon set from a live site and turns them into a token file that produces branded, offline, single-file slide decks. This section is written to hand off to it cleanly.

If you have no site yet, fill in what you have decided and mark the rest [TBD]. Four confirmed values beat twenty invented ones.

Colour

A colour sampled from a button may wash out as a large heading or a big number. Check each value in the role it will actually play, on white and on dark.

Type

Font files: [TBD — where they live]

Licence: [TBD]

Check the licence before you embed a font in anything you send out. Many commercial and institutional licences cover use but not redistribution, and a self-contained HTML file with the font embedded is redistribution. This catches people out with files built specifically to be forwarded.

Layout

Rules

House style, so output is consistent without re-specifying it every time. Adjust to taste; the point is that a decision exists.

• No emoji in any produced document, deck or interface. Text labels and colour carry status. (The ☐ ✓ ✗ glyphs in these worksheet templates are structural markers, not emoji, and are exempt.)
• Depth comes from hairline borders and one dark register — not from drop shadows or gradients.
• No gradients on type. No pill-shaped call-to-action buttons.
• Two type registers used consistently: display for headings, tracked-uppercase labels for structure.
• Hierarchy comes from role, not from improvised font sizes.
• Any unverified number in a draft is visibly marked so it cannot pass for final.

Assets

Photography: real product, real work, real people. Founders under-invest here and then wonder why their deck looks generic. The photograph of your technician in uniform doing the job is worth more than any stock image, and it costs a phone call.

Compress before use — around 1600px on the long edge at moderate quality. It is the difference between a 4 MB attachment and a 15 MB one that nobody opens.

Where the brand appears

Everything below should carry the same name, colours, type and claims. Inconsistency across these is noticed and it is cheap to fix.

Headline numbers must agree across every surface. Customer counts, revenue, funds deployed, years in operation — if the website says one thing and the deck says another, the discrepancy will be found by the one person doing arithmetic, and it costs more credibility than the number ever earned. Reconcile them here and note the definition you are using.