Branding cheatsheet: the one-page brief we hand founders

Last week a founder sent us a Figma file at 22:47 with the message "designer says we need brand guidelines first, can you make some?" The file had three logos, four shades of blue, two fonts, and a tagline in Polish that nobody at the company spoke. They had been live for two years.

This happens more than you would think. The founder is busy, the designer wants direction, and nobody wrote down what the brand is supposed to feel like. So we made a cheatsheet. One page. Plain words. We hand it to every founder before we open Figma, before we hire a designer, before we change a homepage hero.

Here is what is on it, and why.

The positioning sentence

One sentence, three slots. "We help [who] do [what] without [the friction]." No commas, no parentheses, no second sentence.

We help [WHO] do [WHAT] without [FRICTION].

Example (real):
We help Dutch bookkeepers chase overdue invoices
without writing the email themselves.

If a founder cannot fill this in without using the word "platform" or "solution," they do not have positioning yet. They have a product. Those are different.

The two real audiences

We ask for two. Not "small businesses in Europe." Two named people. Job title, company size, the moment in their day when they would look for what you sell.

"Marja, operations lead at a 22-person logistics firm in Rotterdam, Thursday afternoon, trying to reconcile a 600-row spreadsheet." That is a brief. "SMEs in EU" is not.

The voice rules, in five lines

Voice is the hardest one to get out of a founder. Most say "professional but friendly," which is meaningless. So we force a format:

• One sentence we would say.
• One sentence we would never say.
• Reading level (we default to Hemingway grade 7).
• The three words we overuse on purpose.
• The three words we ban.

The bans are the most useful line. One client banned "solution," "ecosystem," and "journey." Their copy got about 40% shorter in a week, and nobody missed any of it.

Colors as numbers, not adjectives

"Warm but professional" is not a color. We need hex values, in pairs, with the contrast ratio written next to them. A brand needs at most:

• One primary (the one you put on a button)
• One ink (the one you set body text in)
• One paper (the background, rarely pure white)
• One accent (for links and warnings, used sparingly)

For each pair, we write the WCAG AA ratio. If primary on paper is below 4.5:1, it goes back. The W3C WCAG 2.1 contrast rule is non-negotiable, not because of compliance, but because a brand that fails on a phone in sunlight is not a brand.

Two typefaces, named

One display, one body. Both with a fallback that ships natively on macOS, iOS, Windows, and Android. The cheatsheet has a single line:

font-family: "Inter Tight", system-ui, -apple-system, "Segoe UI", sans-serif;

We default to Inter Tight because it carries weight from 200 to 900 in one family and the metrics line up cleanly with the system stack. If a founder wants three typefaces, we ask which one they would drop in a power outage. There is always one.

The logo, in four files

Not a kit. Four files.

1. Full mark, SVG, on transparent.
2. Monogram, SVG, on transparent.
3. Full mark in a single ink color (for one-color print and email signatures).
4. Favicon, 32×32, hand-drawn pixel-aligned, not auto-exported.

The fourth one is the one founders skip and then regret. The auto-export from Figma at 32px looks like a smudge. Open the SVG, snap the vertices to the pixel grid, save it as a separate file. It takes ten minutes and you do it once.

Photo direction in one paragraph

"Real photos of real people doing real work, shot on natural light, no stock smiles, no laptops on beaches." If you cannot write this paragraph, you will end up with a homepage full of headset call-center women looking at the camera. Every founder swears they will not let this happen. Most do.

The No List

This is the page everyone skips and the page that saves the project. A bulleted list of words, images, motifs, and metaphors that are off-limits for this brand. Real lines from real client cheatsheets:

• No rocket ships.
• No lightbulb-as-idea metaphor.
• No "the future of X."
• No purple gradients.
• No people in headsets.
• No infinity loops.

The No List grows over time. Add to it whenever a designer pitches something that makes you wince. The wince is data.

What this is not

It is not a 60-page PDF. It is not a Notion database with 14 nested pages. It is not a "brand bible." Those exist, and they are useful past roughly €5M in revenue when you have a marketing team that needs to argue with itself in writing. Before that, they are a way to feel like a real company without doing the work.

The cheatsheet fits on one A4. We print it. We tape it to the wall during the design phase. When a designer asks "what shade of green?" the answer is on the wall, in hex, with a contrast ratio.

A note on AI-generated brands

We have seen a wave of founders feed their positioning into a model and get back a logo, a palette, and a name in thirty seconds. Some of them are not bad. None of them are decisions. A brand produced by a model is a brand the founder did not choose, which means they cannot defend it in a meeting six months from now when someone asks why the button is teal. The cheatsheet exists so that whatever you decide (with a model, with a designer, on a sticky note in the kitchen), you wrote it down and you know why.

When we built the chat agent for a Rotterdam logistics firm last month, the brand cheatsheet had been finished a year before we arrived. That was the only reason the agent's voice landed correctly on day one, because there was a single document that told us which three words to avoid. If you are about to start a website project or any AI build that has to speak in your voice, fill the cheatsheet first. We will not start a design phase without it, and you should not let anyone else either.

The smallest thing you can do today: open a blank document, write the positioning sentence in the [WHO] [WHAT] [FRICTION] format, and refuse to leave the line until it works. The rest follows from there.