How I built a brand identity using AI

May 2026 · Design & Branding

The domain name envision8.com had been sitting with me for years. It came from an earlier project idea — something about bringing ideas to life. That felt right then and it still feels right now. When I decided to build something around it properly, I knew the brand had to reflect that same spirit.

What I didn't expect was how quickly it would all come together.

Starting with the guidelines

The first thing I did was have a conversation with Claude about what Envision8 was, what it stood for, and how it should feel. Not a brief — a proper back and forth. What's the tone? Who's it for? What should someone feel when they land on the site?

From that conversation, Claude produced a full brand guidelines document in markdown. That choice of format was deliberate. Markdown is easy for a human to read and edit, and it's equally easy for AI to consume later. It becomes a reusable asset — not just a document, but context that can inform every piece of work that follows.

I'm a systems thinker at heart. Even while doing something creative like building a brand, part of my brain is already asking: how do I make this repeatable? Markdown answered that question before I'd even finished asking it.

The guidelines covered colour palette, typography, tone of voice, logo rules — the full picture. I reviewed it and noticed a few gaps around colour edge cases, which I filled in from experience. That's the honest truth of working with AI: it gets you most of the way there fast, and your judgement closes the gap.

The logo in ten minutes

Next came the logo. I described what I had in mind — the wordmark, the contrast between the light letterforms and the bold numeral, the superscript positioning — and Claude produced a first version as an Excalidraw artifact.

It wasn't pretty. But the concept was right, and that was enough to validate the direction.

The second iteration came as an SVG. The styling landed well. The positioning was slightly off. Third time, it was exactly right. From there, a full suite of SVG files was generated — horizontal and stacked variants, light and dark versions, multiple sizes for different contexts.

Start to finish: about ten minutes.

Building the site

The site itself was built on a Bootstrap template I'd purchased from Wrapmarket a few years ago. Still maintained, still solid. A good foundation.

I worked through the layout with Claude Code — discussing the structure, planning the pages, thinking through how the content would sit. It also talked me through setting up Cloudflare Pages so that every push to the GitHub repository automatically deploys to the live site. That part took a few hours to get right, not because the concepts were wrong, but because the Cloudflare interface had moved on since the AI's knowledge was last updated. Menus had shifted. Options had been renamed. That's one area where patience and a bit of trial and error still matter.

The first wireframe was structurally sound and completely flat. That's when things got more interesting.

The robot enters the picture

Once the structure was right, I started thinking about personality. That's when the Hero Robot was born — an orange character that sits on the homepage and sets the tone immediately. Described once to Claude, generated as a visual, then adapted with different expressions for different sections of the site. The same character, different moods, different contexts.

It's a small thing, but it makes the site feel like a place rather than a template.

A day's work

By the end of the day, the brand was defined, the logo was done, the site was live, and the content was in place. Notes I'd been collecting over months — ideas, reflections, experiments — were pulled from a GitHub repository, digested, and turned into journal posts.

Something that would have taken weeks of back and forth with a designer and copywriter became a focused, enjoyable day's work. And I could watch it build in real time while doing other things.

That's what building with AI actually looks like. Not magic. Not automated. A genuine collaboration where you bring the vision, the taste, and the experience — and AI brings the speed.

Posted by Envision8 · envision8.com