Use Applying Brand Guidelines safely

What Applying Brand Guidelines is and why it matters

Applying Brand Guidelines is an example skill from Anthropic's official claude-cookbooks repository, specifically from the skills/custom_skills directory. It demonstrates how to build a custom skill that ensures documents generated by Claude, such as PowerPoint presentations, Excel spreadsheets, and PDF reports, consistently follow a company's brand guidelines. In its published form, the skill works with the fictional brand guidelines of a sample company called Acme Corporation, including specific color values, fonts, logo placement rules, and standard opening and closing phrases. It is important to understand that this is a teaching example rather than a ready-to-use production solution: the skill demonstrates the pattern for building a custom branding skill and must be replaced with a company's actual brand guidelines before any production use. The concept is relevant for teams that regularly have Claude generate documents and want to avoid re-explaining colors, font sizes, logo placement, and tone of voice with every single request.

Prerequisites

Using the skill requires access to Claude with skills enabled, whether through Claude.ai, Claude Code, or the Claude API, plus the ability to create and optionally upload a custom folder containing a SKILL.md file. A basic understanding of your own company's actual brand guidelines is a prerequisite, since the placeholder values in the example, such as color codes, font families, and boilerplate text, need to be replaced with your real brand standards before the skill can be meaningfully used in production.

Setting it up step by step

First, clone or download the claude-cookbooks repository and copy the applying-brand-guidelines folder from skills/custom_skills into your own skills directory. Next, systematically replace all example values in the SKILL.md file: the color palette with your brand's actual hex codes, the font hierarchy with the font families used in your company, the logo rules with the correct placement and spacing requirements, and the standard phrases with your company's actual tone of voice. The skill also references two optional helper scripts, apply_brand.py and validate_brand.py, which likewise need to be adapted to your own environment if you use them, before placing the finished skill into the .claude/skills directory or uploading it through the Claude console or API. A test run with a simple document request afterward shows whether the guidelines are being applied correctly.

Security and best practices

Because this is a template with fictional example data, the biggest risk is accidentally deploying it unchanged, which would cause Claude to stamp the fictional Acme Corporation branding onto real documents. Before any production use, the full file should therefore be checked for leftover placeholder values. Anyone working in a regulated industry, such as finance or healthcare, should additionally keep in mind that a branding skill only implements design guidance and does not substitute for legal or compliance review; generated documents should still be signed off by a responsible person before external distribution. Since brand guidelines, as noted in the example file itself, tend to change on a regular cadence, the skill should be checked against the current real guidelines at fixed intervals.

Practical example and limitations

One use case is generating a PowerPoint presentation, where the skill instructs Claude to follow specific header colors, a defined logo size and position, and a maximum number of bullet points per slide. The skill's limitation is that it only controls formatting and rough text boilerplate rather than replacing a full design process with human review, and that it does not update itself automatically when a company's actual brand guidelines change; it has to be maintained manually instead.