How to hand over your brand guidelines PDF and have them actually followed
Send Vizard Agent the guidelines file itself rather than a summary of it. It renders the pages as images at a readable size, reads the typography, layout and accessibility guidance directly, installs the brand fonts it finds, and builds to those rules, leaving out any files in your shared drive marked as not for use.
What do you type into Vizard Agent?
List the prohibitions as clearly as the requirements. A brand document mostly tells Vizard Agent what to do, but the things a client actually rejects a film over tend to be the ones nobody wrote down anywhere, so say those out loud in the brief. Name the approved folders too.
Prompt
What does Vizard Agent actually do?
A summary of your guidelines keeps the hex codes and the typeface name, and loses the spacing rules, the type hierarchy, the minimum contrast ratio and the list of forbidden things. Vizard Agent treats the document as a source to read, not a reference to quote. The job was an institutional film built from a shared drive and a brand book. In the session behind this article it:
- Inventoried every shared folder, including the subfolders, and checked for files marked do-not-use and whether the brand fonts were installed.
- Downloaded the videos, brand files, report and fonts, and built contact sheets of the footage.
- Catalogued the approved photo folders that fitted the story and tiled previews of them into labelled sheets.
- Installed a renderer and rendered the brand guide as page images, because reading a PDF as text loses the layout it demonstrates.
- Read the typography, layout and accessibility guidance at readable size.
- Built to those rules, with the prohibitions held throughout.
When does this not work well?
Guidelines written for print do not always translate to video. A document about letterheads and business cards says little about motion, safe areas or caption timing, and there Vizard Agent infers from the spirit of the document rather than following a stated rule. Guidelines that contradict themselves, and fonts you have no rights to, cause trouble too.
Common questions
Can it read a PDF? Yes. Vizard Agent renders the pages and reads them as a designer would.
Will it install our fonts? Yes, if you supply the files or a site Vizard Agent can fetch them from.
Can it tell me which rule it followed? Yes. Ask Vizard Agent which page a decision came from.