Creative Brief Selector

Creative Brief Selector

A starting-point selector for brand and microsite builds. Given a business spec (name, vertical, shape, one-line vibe, optional list of shipped demos), produces a creative brief grounded in three things:

1. An archetype position from brand-archetype-system, picked or composed to be deliberately distinct from the shipped demos.
2. A small set of live reference sites for that archetype-and-vertical combination, drawn from a curated bank plus optional per-build discovery.
3. A divergence check against the shipped demos that flags palette, voice, structural pattern, and section-shape overlap before the brief is handed off.

The brief output is concrete tokens, not abstract families, including explicit section-shape choices (hero shape and footer shape) as first-class outputs alongside palette and voice. It is meant to be loaded by downstream build skills as the single creative artifact for the build.

When to use

• Starting any new brand or microsite build that should land in a specific aesthetic position.
• The first build in a portfolio (no prior builds to diverge from yet, but the divergence schema can be seeded for the next one).
• The second through nth build in a portfolio, where the risk of sibling output is real.
• After a portfolio audit that surfaced sibling builds: this skill is the systemic fix for the pattern.
• When a build's creative direction is being chosen between two adjacent archetypes and the call needs a reference-grounded reason.

When NOT to use

• The user wants pure aesthetic methodology guidance (use creative-direction).
• The user has a finished archetype and a finished brief and is asking for execution (skip to the downstream build skills).
• The user wants a logo or a finished identity (use logo-design, brand-identity).
• The user wants to define voice for an existing brand (use brand-voice).
• Defining brand strategy from zero positioning (use brand-ideation first, then return to this skill).

How this composes with other skills

This skill works upstream of build-time skills and parallel to the aesthetic methodology layer:

• brand-archetype-system (upstream input). The archetype catalog this skill picks from. The skill names the archetype in the rendered brief; it does not redefine the archetype's defaults.
• creative-direction (parallel input). The four-axis vocabulary the archetypes reference. If the consumer needs the full axis brief, run creative-direction first; this skill's brief consumes its outputs.
• brand-identity (downstream). Once the brief is approved, brand-identity turns it into a finished identity system.
• landing-page-copy, content-and-copy, art-direction (downstream). Every downstream skill that produces aesthetic output references this skill's brief.

Direct verbatim copying of an archetype's default palette into a new brand is the failure mode this skill exists to prevent. The brief shifts the archetype's defaults toward the business spec's specifics.