Brand onboarding

The brand-onboarding skill (shipped in @drawnagency/authoring, linked into every client repo as .claude/skills/brand-onboarding/) scaffolds the Brand Foundation page — Drawn’s working document for the client onboarding phase of an engagement — and describes how to evolve it as new material arrives.

The three-page model

• Brand Foundation (slug brand-foundation) — the onboarding working document: info-gathering, alignment observations, and personality drafting. A companion scratch pad. It does not evolve into the other pages; it is archived once its job is done.
• Brand Atlas — the polished foundation narrative (story, values, personality).
• Brand Guide — the standards (logo, color, type, voice).

The pages evolve in tandem from day one — the Foundation is a working document, not a staging area. The Atlas and Guide grow as narrative and standards land; material only occasionally moves between pages, at the operator’s direction, through ordinary editing. There is no finalization step, and the Foundation page is archived whenever its job is done. Git history is the record — every published state is preserved automatically, so never simulate history inside page content (no “as of <date>” framing, no timestamps-as-content).

Scaffold vs evolve

• Scaffold — first build from intake materials: settles the page plan (which of Foundation/Guide/Atlas to create), shapes the page from the four-group armature (Getting Started, Brand Alignment, Brand Personality, Round 1).
• Evolve — every later update is an ordinary editing session (connector or /edit) with the new material as context: fill blanks in the client’s language, add observations-as-questions, rewrite or remove settled items, iterate the personality, add rounds. No special tooling.

Conventions

• Brand Foundation page settings — slug brand-foundation (display title bespoke per client), showInNav: true, default audience access. Do not add special audiences or per-section access restrictions.
• Edit settled content in place — when new material answers a blank or closes an observation, just rewrite or remove it. Git preserves every prior published state, so there is no archive-on-resolve step.
• archived means dormant-but-resurrectable — a campaign page that ended, or a Foundation page whose job is done. Never use it to mean “resolved”.
• Blanks are the agenda — prompts the client cannot yet answer (success criteria, good-to-knows, decision makers, additional partners) stay visibly blank; they are the next call’s agenda. Never invent an answer to fill one.
• Observations are questions — alignment findings are framed for discussion (“you describe the brand as X; the materials lean Y — which is it?”), never as verdicts. Drawn holds the pen; clients are read-only viewers.
• Drawn-internal material stays in operator notes — candid observations live in the operator’s own intake notes, out of the portal. If something must travel with the page for editors’ eyes only, a draft section is the escape hatch (drafts never render for viewers) — use sparingly.

Via the MCP connector

Use the brand_onboarding prompt (args: siteId, context) or call get_onboarding_guide before scaffolding or editing a Brand Foundation page. The guidance is embedded at connector build time from packages/authoring/skills/brand-onboarding/guidance/onboarding-core.md — edit the process there.