Preface¶

When using AI to generate presentations, documents, or web pages, color matching and typography often vary arbitrarily: one blue for headings, one gray for body text, and a completely different style after another revision by someone else. The larger the team, the more obvious the problem of visual inconsistency. Design specification documents usually sit in PDFs or Figma files, and Agents cannot read them automatically—you still have to manually paste color values and font names every time.

Anthropic provides an example Skill called brand-guidelines in its official Skills repository: write the brand’s primary colors, accent colors, and typography rules into SKILL.md, and after the Agent loads it, it will follow a unified standard when generating all kinds of deliverables. For enterprise teams, this is also a directly referenceable template for building an “internal design specification Skill”.

What is this¶

brand-guidelines is an Agent Skill maintained by Anthropic, with its source code located in the skills/brand-guidelines/ directory of the anthropics/skills repository. The Skill uses the universal SKILL.md format and can be used in tools that support Agent Skills such as Cursor, Claude Code, Claude.ai, and Claude API.

Its positioning is clear: apply Anthropic’s official brand color and typography specifications to any deliverable that “may benefit from Anthropic’s visual style”—including presentations, documents, HTML pages, etc. The official description field states that this Skill should be enabled when brand colors, style guides, visual formatting, or company design standards are involved.

The Skill directory structure is extremely minimal, containing only two files:
- SKILL.md: Brand specification text and metadata
- LICENSE.txt: Apache License 2.0 open source license

There are no attached Python scripts or resource folders; all specifications are written in Markdown instructions, which the Agent reads and executes.

Core Features and Highlights¶

Complete Brand Color Palette¶

The Skill defines two sets of colors, all with hexadecimal values for the Agent to reference accurately:

Main Colors:

Accent Colors:

Typography and Hierarchy Rules¶

• Headings: Poppins (fall back to Arial if unavailable)
• Body text: Lora (fall back to Georgia if unavailable)
• Headings 24pt and larger use Poppins; all body text uses Lora uniformly
• The official recommendation is to pre-install Poppins and Lora for the best rendering results; the system font will be automatically downgraded if not installed

Intelligent Style Application¶

The Skill instructions describe three types of behaviors that the Agent should follow:
1. Intelligent typography application: Distinguish headings and body text by font size, and automatically fall back when custom fonts are missing.
2. Text styling: Select appropriate text colors based on the brightness of the background, while preserving the original hierarchical structure.
3. Shapes and accent colors: Non-text shapes (such as chart blocks, decorative graphics) cycle through the three accent colors of orange, blue, and green, which unifies the brand feel while avoiding the page from being too monotonous.

Integration with Document Generation¶

The technical description of the Skill mentions that color values are applied via the RGBColor class in python-pptx—this indicates that it is mainly targeted at scenarios where the Agent generates Office documents such as PowerPoint. The same series of document Skills in the Anthropic repository, such as pptx and docx, can be used in combination with brand-guidelines: the former is responsible for file structure and content, and the latter is responsible for visual specifications.

Reference Value for Enterprise Workflows¶

brand-guidelines itself is not complex, but its model is very representative: turn design specifications from “documents for humans to read” into “instructions for Agents to read”. Teams can follow this structure, write their own logo usage, color palettes, fonts, and spacing rules into SKILL.md, and let AI automatically align the brand when writing external materials, internal reports, and customer proposals, reducing repeated proofreading.

Installation and Activation¶

Obtain the Skill Files¶

Clone or download the corresponding directory from the official repository:

git clone https://github.com/anthropics/skills.git
cp -r skills/skills/brand-guidelines /path/to/your/skills/brand-guidelines

You can also just download the two files SKILL.md and LICENSE.txt under skills/brand-guidelines/, keeping the directory name brand-guidelines unchanged.

Use in Cursor¶

Cursor scans for Skills in the following directories on startup:

Just place the brand-guidelines folder into any of the above directories, for example:

mkdir -p .cursor/skills
cp -r /path/to/brand-guidelines .cursor/skills/

After restarting Cursor or reopening the project, the Agent will automatically match this Skill based on the task description; you can also explicitly call it by mentioning “use brand-guidelines” or /brand-guidelines (if registered as a slash command) in the conversation.

Use in Claude Code¶

Anthropic’s official README provides the Plugin installation method. First register the marketplace:

/plugin marketplace add anthropics/skills

Then install the sample Skill collection (brand-guidelines belongs to the Enterprise & Communication category of samples):

/plugin install example-skills@anthropic-agent-skills

After installation, specify that you need to typeset according to Anthropic’s brand specification in the conversation to trigger it.

Use in Claude.ai¶

According to the anthropics/skills repository description, the sample Skills in this repository are already available to paid Claude.ai users. You can also upload a custom Skill folder according to Using skills in Claude.

Use via Claude API¶

API users can upload or reference preset Skills via the Skills API. The specific endpoints and permissions shall prevail according to Anthropic’s official documentation.

SKILL.md Metadata Format¶

The YAML frontmatter of this Skill is as follows (extracted from the official source code):

---
name: brand-guidelines
description: Applies Anthropic's official brand colors and typography to any sort of artifact that may benefit from having Anthropic's look-and-feel. Use it when brand colors or style guidelines, visual formatting, or company design standards apply.
license: Complete terms in LICENSE.txt
---

name and description are required fields specified by the Agent Skills specification; the Agent mainly judges when to load this Skill based on description.

Typical Usage Examples¶

The official SKILL.md does not provide fixed command lines, but combined with its description and the usage patterns in the Anthropic repository README, the following prompt words can be directly reproduced:

Generate brand-consistent presentations:

Please use the brand-guidelines Skill, follow Anthropic's official brand colors and fonts,
help me create an 8-page product introduction PPT outline, and output the layout and color matching instructions for each page.
Use Poppins for headings, Lora for body text, and prioritize #d97757 for accent colors.

** Beautify an existing HTML page:**

Load brand-guidelines, and change the color scheme and fonts of this HTML to Anthropic's brand specifications:
Background #faf9f5, main text #141413, links and buttons use #d97757 / #6a9bcc / #788c5d in rotation.

Combine with the pptx Skill (Claude Code scenario):

First use the pptx Skill to generate a quarterly report slide deck,
then adjust the styles uniformly according to the color palette and typography rules in brand-guidelines.

Starting point for team-built specifications:

Refer to the structure of anthropics/skills' brand-guidelines,
help me write a SKILL.md that includes our company's primary color #1a365d, secondary color #ed8936, and heading font "Source Han Sans" for the Agent to use when writing external documents.

When using it, try to specify keywords such as “brand color”, “visual specification”, and “Anthropic style” in the prompt words, which will help the Agent correctly match the trigger conditions in the description.

Applicable Scenarios and Notes¶

Who This Is For¶

• Teams that frequently use AI to generate external materials such as PPTs, Word documents, and HTML pages
• Content creators or developers who want AI outputs to match Anthropic’s official visual style
• Enterprise design or engineering teams planning to build an “internal brand Skill”
• Beginners learning Agent Skills writing patterns (simple structure, easy to fork and modify)

Usage Restrictions¶

1. Limited specification scope: The Skill only covers Anthropic’s official color palette and typography, and does not include logo files, icon libraries, or complete VI manuals; commercial use of Anthropic’s trademarks still needs to comply with its brand policies.
2. Font environment dependencies: Poppins and Lora need to be pre-installed in the user environment; otherwise, the Agent will fall back to Arial / Georgia, and the visual effect may slightly differ from the official version.
3. Demonstration nature: The Disclaimer in the repository states that these Skills are mainly used for demonstration and education, and the behavior in the production environment may not fully match the examples. Key deliverables should be manually spot-checked.
4. No automated scripts: There are no pre-installed Python scripts in the directory; the Agent needs to call tools such as python-pptx on its own to implement color matching, and the specific effect depends on the Agent’s capabilities and the operating environment.
5. Cross-tool differences: The built-in version of Claude.ai, the Claude Code Plugin version, and the local copy version of Cursor have different loading paths and triggering methods, please refer to the official documentation of each platform.

Practical Advice for Building Internal Brand Skills¶

If you refer to brand-guidelines to write internal specifications for your team, it is recommended to:
- Write clear trigger scenarios in the description (such as “external PPT”, “official website banner”, “customer email template”)
- Unify color values using HEX or RGB, avoid only using color names
- Distinguish between “must use” and “recommended reference” rules to reduce excessive constraints on the Agent
- Split lengthy specifications into a references/ subdirectory and reference them in SKILL.md to keep the main file concise

Summary¶

brand-guidelines encapsulates Anthropic’s official brand colors (such as primary colors #141413 / #faf9f5, accent colors #d97757, etc.) and typography combinations (Poppins + Lora) into executable Agent Skill instructions, solving the common problem of visual style drift in AI-generated content. It has a lightweight structure and is open source under Apache 2.0 license. It can not only be directly used for Anthropic-style deliverables, but also serves as a template for enterprises to build their own design specification Skills.

Official repository address: https://github.com/anthropics/skills/tree/main/skills/brand-guidelines