Installing Brand Kit

If you've ever stared at a blank page trying to name your colors, pick fonts, write a positioning statement, and figure out what your logo should even look like, you know how slow brand work is. Most solo founders end up with a Canva logo, three random fonts they like, and no real system. Then six months later, they're rebuilding everything from scratch.

The Brand Kit skill collapses that whole exercise into one conversation. You give Claude a brand name and a paragraph about the vibe. It generates a strategy doc, a full color system, a font pairing, four to six logo variants, social profile pictures and banners, a brand guidelines Word doc, a color and typography PDF, and an HTML preview that ties the whole kit together. The whole flow runs in around ten minutes and costs roughly fifty cents to a dollar in image-generation fees.

This guide walks you through every step. Getting your API key, installing the skill in whichever Claude surface you use, configuring it on first run, generating your first kit using a worked example, iterating on the parts you want to change, and handling the common issues that come up.

What You'll End Up With

Before you spend any time setting this up, here's exactly what comes out the other side of one run. Every brand kit lives in its own folder and contains:

What You Need Before You Start

Three things. None of them take long, but you want them lined up before you open Claude so the setup runs in one sitting.

1. A Fal AI account and API key. Fal is the image-generation service the skill calls behind the scenes. It's the only paid dependency. Section 03 walks through the signup.
2. A few dollars in your Fal account. Each brand kit runs about fifty cents to a dollar in generation costs. Fal's pay-as-you-go billing means you only pay for what you generate. A five-dollar starting credit gives you room for five to ten kits while you get comfortable.
3. The brand-kit.skill file. This is the actual skill bundle. You'll either get this from wherever you bought it or generate it yourself if you built the skill. It's a single file that drops straight into Claude.

Step 1: Getting Your Fal AI API Key

Fal AI is the image-generation provider the skill uses. It's a hosted service that gives you access to several modern image models, including Recraft v3 for logos, Ideogram v3 for typography-heavy designs, and Flux Pro Ultra for illustrative work. The skill picks the right model for each variant automatically. You don't pick.

The signup takes about three minutes.

1. Go to fal.ai. Open the site in your browser. Click Sign up at the top right. You can sign up with Google, GitHub, or email. Google is the fastest.
2. Add billing info. Fal works on pay-as-you-go, so you'll be asked to add a card during onboarding or on first key creation. You only get charged for what you actually generate.
3. Open the API Keys page. Once you're in the dashboard, find the API Keys section in the sidebar.
4. Create a new key. Click Create Key, give it a name like "brand-kit" so you'll remember what it's for, and confirm.
5. Copy the key right away. Fal shows the full key only once, immediately after you create it. Copy it to your clipboard now. If you lose it, you'll need to create a new one, which is fine but annoying.

About the costs

The skill uses two Fal models in normal operation:

• Recraft v3 for logo variants. Roughly four cents per image.
• Flux Pro Ultra for social banner artwork. Roughly six cents per image.

A standard kit at default settings runs four to six logos plus five social pieces, which lands at fifty cents to a dollar in total. The skill shows you the estimated cost before each generation step and waits for your approval, so you'll never be surprised by a bill.

Step 2: Installing in Cowork (Claude Desktop App)

Cowork is the workflow mode inside Claude Desktop that lets Claude work with files on your computer. It's where you'll spend most of your time using this skill if you're not a developer. The install takes about thirty seconds.

1. Open Claude Desktop. Make sure you're in Cowork mode. You can tell because Cowork shows file access in the side panel and lets Claude write files to a folder you've selected.
2. Drag the brand-kit.skill file into the chat. Just drag it from your Downloads folder or wherever you saved it directly onto the chat window. A confirmation panel will pop up showing the skill name and description.
3. Click Save skill. The skill gets registered and is available immediately. You don't need to restart anything.

If your version of Claude Desktop doesn't accept the drag-and-drop, there's a fallback. Open the Customize menu (it's in the settings or the side panel depending on your version), find the Skills section, click Upload skill, and pick the file from there.

Step 3: Installing in Claude Code (via Claude Desktop App)

If you use Claude Code, the developer-focused mode that runs inside Claude Desktop, the install is slightly different because Claude Code reads skills from a folder rather than a drag-and-drop.

1. Rename the file. Change brand-kit.skill to brand-kit.zip. A .skill file is just a renamed zip, so this lets your OS unzip it.
2. Unzip the file. Double-click on Windows or Mac, or run unzip brand-kit.zip in a terminal. You'll get a brand-kit/ folder containing the skill.
3. Move the folder into your Claude Code skills directory. The path depends on whether you want this skill available everywhere or just in one project.

On Windows, the ~ shorthand expands to your user folder, so the full path is something like C:\Users\YourName\.claude\skills\brand-kit\. If the .claude folder doesn't exist yet, create it.

4. Restart Claude Code. Skills are loaded at startup, so you need to quit and relaunch for the new skill to register.

Step 4: First Run Setup

The first time you trigger the skill, it asks three required questions plus a few optional ones. The whole thing takes about ninety seconds.

The required questions

Open a chat in Claude (Cowork or Claude Code, either works) and say something like:

1. Paste your Fal AI key. The one you copied at the end of Step 1. Claude saves it locally, validates it with a one-cent test image to make sure it works, and confirms back to you showing only the last four characters so the key never gets echoed in full.
2. Pick your output folder. This is where your brand kits will land. You can pick a specific folder or let the skill default to a brand-kits/ folder right next to itself. Either is fine. Pick wherever feels easiest to find later.
3. Choose your default social platforms. The skill suggests a sensible default set (profile pic, X banner, LinkedIn personal, LinkedIn company, Instagram square). You can add Facebook, YouTube, or anything else, or remove any of the defaults.

The optional questions

After the required ones, the skill offers three quick optional questions. You can skip any or all.

Once you've answered, the skill writes a config.json file next to itself and confirms. You won't see these questions again.

Step 5: Generating Your First Brand Kit

Now the fun part. We'll walk through generating a complete kit for a fictional brand called Northridge Coffee, a small specialty coffee shop. You can copy this exact prompt to see how the skill handles a real-world brief.

The prompt

That's a paragraph any small business owner could write about their own business. No design jargon, no positioning theory, just the actual vibe. The skill takes it from there.

What happens next

The skill walks through the pipeline with checkpoints so you can adjust at each step. You'll see:

1. A brief echo and one or two follow-up questions. The vibe paragraph above is rich, so the skill might only ask a single clarifying question, like which competitors you'd specifically not want to feel like. Answer in one sentence, then it locks the brief.
2. The strategy. A full identity package, mission, voice, audience persona, positioning, tagline plus two alternates, and key messages. Around two to three pages of readable text plus the underlying strategy.json file. The skill stops here and asks if it lands. If anything sounds off, just say so and it'll edit.
3. The visual system. Once you approve the strategy, the skill generates the color palette and picks a Google Fonts pairing. You'll see the primary, secondary, and accent colors with hex codes, the chosen heading and body fonts with rationale, and another checkpoint asking if it looks right.
4. A cost preview before the logos. The skill tells you the estimated Fal spend (somewhere around twenty to thirty cents for the logo variants) and waits for your approval before calling the API.
5. The logos. Four to six variants generated and saved as PNG transparent in three sizes, plus JPG on white, plus a single-page logo sheet PDF.
6. Another cost preview before the social assets, then the social pack generated and composited at exact platform dimensions.
7. Final delivery. The brand guidelines Word doc, the color and typography PDF, and the index.html preview, all assembled automatically. The skill links you to index.html and you open it to see everything in one view.

Step 6: Iterating on the Kit

The first version is rarely the final version. The skill is built around named regeneration commands so you can fix specific pieces without redoing the whole kit. Just say what you want changed in plain English.

The important thing is that regenerations preserve everything you didn't ask to change. If you say "try a warmer palette," the strategy and fonts stay locked in. The skill doesn't redo your work just because you asked for a different color.

How to decide what to iterate on

Open the index.html preview and look at the whole kit in context. Common things people change after seeing the first version:

• The palette feels too cool or too warm for the vibe
• The logo style direction is off (too minimal, too illustrative)
• The tagline lands awkwardly
• The heading font is too editorial or too geometric for the audience

If you find yourself wanting to change the strategy itself, that's worth pausing for. The strategy drives everything downstream, so a change there means the palette and logos were built on a brief that's now wrong. Better to nail the strategy at Checkpoint 1 than to rebuild after the fact.

Troubleshooting Common Issues

Most things that can go wrong are recoverable in one or two steps. Here are the issues users hit most often.

"Fal API call fails with 401 or 403"

Your key is invalid, expired, or revoked. Say "change my fal key" and paste a fresh one from your Fal dashboard. If the new key also fails, check that your Fal account has billing set up and isn't past its spend cap.

"My logo looks generic"

The vibe paragraph and your mood words determine how distinctive the logo feels. "Modern" alone produces generic outputs because every brand wants to feel modern. Add one or two more specific words about how this brand should feel different from competitors. Then say "regenerate logos" with the new direction.

"The color palette feels off"

Two common causes. Either your mood words contradict each other (like "playful and somber") or your industry signals are unclear. Surface the contradiction yourself if you can spot it, pick a direction, and say "try a [warmer/cooler/more muted/brighter] palette". Palette regen is free, so iterate as much as you want here.

"The docx or PDF won't open"

Usually means the file didn't finish writing. Check the file size, anything over 10KB usually means it completed. If it's corrupted, just say "rebuild the docs" and the skill regenerates them. Idempotent and safe to rerun.

"The index.html looks broken"

The preview page expects sibling folders (logos/, social/, docs/) to exist next to it. If you moved the folder around or deleted something, those references break. The fix is either to put the missing folders back or to rerun the relevant generation step. The HTML itself is self-contained with no external dependencies, so it should always work as long as the sibling folders are in place.

"Fal call is taking a long time"

Image generation usually completes in 10 to 30 seconds per image. If you're waiting longer than two minutes for a single image, something's wrong with the request. Cancel, wait 30 seconds for any rate limit to clear, and retry. If multiple retries fail, switch to a different time of day, Fal's load varies.

What to Try Next

Once you've run one kit and seen the output, the value compounds quickly. A few things worth doing in your first week:

• Generate a brand kit for a side project you've been putting off. The kits are cheap enough ($0.50 to $1.00) that it's worth doing one for any business idea you'd want to pressure-test visually. Sometimes seeing the brand makes the idea feel real or makes you realize it's not for you.
• Generate three or four directions for a single brand by changing the vibe paragraph each time. "Calm and premium" vs "playful and bold" produces wildly different kits. Side by side, you'll see which direction your gut actually wants.
• Open the brand guidelines docx in Word. The full strategy, voice examples, color usage, and do's and don'ts are written out so you can hand the file to a contractor, freelancer, or future designer. That's the deliverable most small business owners never have, and it's the difference between a brand that holds together and one that drifts.
• Hand the index.html file to your developer or web designer. Everything they need (hex codes, font names, logo files at multiple sizes) is in one place. No more emailing five attachments and answering questions for a week.

The skill is built to be used over and over, not once. The more brand kits you generate, the better your eye gets for what works in your industry and what doesn't. And every iteration costs a fraction of what a junior designer would charge for a single Canva mockup.

That's it. Run your first kit, iterate on whatever feels off, and within a week you'll have a brand foundation that most small businesses don't get without paying an agency. Go build something.