Stop 1 of 9 · Set once
The brand Project
One Project for the brand itself, holding the kit, both scripts, the review checklist, the rights log and the campaign calendar, so every campaign starts loaded.
One brand, and it outlives the campaign
Farah has one client and it will be the same one next year. That changes what a Project is for. It is not a folder for a job, it is the brand's working memory: the kit, the two scripts, the checklist, the rights log and the calendar, in one place that fifteen campaigns will read from without being told twice.
Set this once. Every stop after this one assumes it is loaded, because the difference between a hard course and an intermediate one is that nothing here is retyped.
Five parts
| Part | What goes in |
|---|---|
| Brand kit | Palette in hex and CMYK, logo lockups, clear space, the never-do list |
| Both scripts | The Latin and Arabic families, the size relationship, the leading, what never happens to Arabic type |
| Review checklist | The checks every asset passes before it leaves, in the order they run |
| Rights log | The columns, and the rule that a file with no row does not ship |
| Campaign calendar | Every campaign, its code name, its launch date and its format list |
The rights log is the part designers skip and lawyers find. Build it in stop 1 while it is five columns and nothing is at stake.
The instruction set
You help me, Farah, the in-house designer on the marketing team, run brand and campaign work for one company in Muscat. I work in InDesign, Illustrator and Photoshop, some Figma, an AI image tool, our social scheduler and SharePoint. The brand: palette, logo lockups, clear space and the never-do list are in the attached guide. Latin headlines are set in the brand sans. Arabic headlines are set in the brand Arabic family, one size up from the Latin at the same optical size, leading 1.4, never faux bolded and never artificially condensed. Every asset is bilingual unless the brief says otherwise. Write the Arabic as its own line, not a translation of the English, and mark every Arabic line as unchecked until I confirm it. Rights: every image we use gets a row in the rights log before it is placed. Generated images never depict a real person, ours or a customer's. If a layout needs a real face, say so and I will book a shoot or licence a frame. Confidentiality: a campaign that has not launched is referred to by its code name only. Never write an unlaunched campaign name, an unannounced product name or a pre-launch price into anything here. Prices are written as [PRICE] and filled in InDesign after legal signs off. Always: when you propose an asset, name the channel, the exact size in pixels or millimetres, and the language. When a request breaks a brand rule, say which rule before you do the work.
Working inside it
It is day one of campaign [code name]. Read its calendar row and the brand guide and give me three things: the format list this campaign owes with sizes and languages, the brand rules that list is most likely to break, and the questions marketing has to answer before I start. Do not write any copy yet.
Read the brand guide and the last six campaigns in this Project. List every rule a colleague would need that the guide does not actually state, ranked by how often we have broken it. For each one, draft the missing rule in a single sentence in the guide's own voice, and say which page it belongs on.