Teaching AI to speak in brand
Reco's brand system, built into two Claude Skills that turn unbranded decks into on-brand drafts in minutes, with fresh layouts instead of swapped-in text.
The system behind the skills
As Reco's sole brand design lead, I built and maintained the brand system the company used before its later rebrand. These two skills put that system in a form Claude could apply, so anyone on the team could get on-brand assets without waiting on design.
Where the system lives
That system lives on a page I designed: Reco's single source of truth for logo, color, type, and illustration, with a PDF and media kit to download.
Scroll inside the frame to see the full page.
Navigation, redesigned
The main navigation got a redesign too, with a menu for each section.
The Brand Guidelines page and the navigation, as I designed them while I was at Reco. Reco has since rebranded, and the current brand is not my work.
A daily cost hiding in plain sight
"The goal: take unbranded decks and rebrand them into Reco style, including new visuals created from the content provided, without waiting on design."
Keeping presentation decks and collateral on-brand was always time-consuming. The effort varied with deck length, the number of visuals, and the design complexity required.
This wasn't a rare edge case. Rebrand requests came in daily across every department. Shifting priorities meant they queued behind other work. Longer turnarounds meant decks shipped off-brand or missed their window entirely.
The opportunity was clear: what if any team member could hand over an unbranded deck and get back a fully styled, visually polished presentation in minutes, not days?
The brand system, encoded
Built to work with me
This project reflects how I think about AI as a design tool, not as a shortcut, but as infrastructure I build and shape to extend my own capabilities. The Reco Claude Skills didn't replace design judgment; they encoded it.
Every creative decision in those skills, the color logic, the layout rules, the visual hierarchy, came from design thinking first. AI is the layer that makes those decisions repeatable, scalable, and available to anyone on the team.
That's the pattern I bring to every workflow: understand the craft deeply, then build systems that carry it forward.
"I don't use AI to do my job. I use it to multiply what I can do, and I build the tools myself."
Testing both approaches on the same deck made the difference obvious.
Claude Design was able to build upon the given content and create entirely new layouts, turning plain slides into visually engaging, on-brand designs. Regular Claude simply placed the text within the template and did not innovate. A light manual clean-up pass is still needed after each run.
Real decks, transformed
Two real Reco decks put through the skills. Browse slide by slide and switch between the original and the AI-rebranded output.
One system, every format
Open full demoBeyond slide decks, the brand system extends to other formats. This HR Newsletter Builder was built for the People team: a brand-aligned starting point they can use without touching a design file, with a quick designer check before it goes out.
| Phase | Status | What happened |
|---|---|---|
| Scoping | Done | Problem mapped. Use-case scorecard: Impact 5/5, Feasibility 3/5. |
| Map | Done | Use case identified: rebrand decks to Reco style. Daily task confirmed across teams. |
| Build | Done | Brand Skill + Design System built and tested. Approximately 2 weeks per skill. |
| Share | Done | Shared with the team. People used them. The skills shipped to real users. |
| Scale | Done | Team adoption was underway, and I was exploring HTML decks for a richer presentation experience. |
Map. Build. Share. Scale.
Design that works even when I'm not there
The goal was never to build a tool for myself. It was to build something anyone on the team could use independently. Both skills shipped, were used by teammates beyond design, and ran in production while I was at Reco.