Brief Engine

Turn scattered inputs into a structured, on-brand creative brief — every time.

Brief Engine turns brief-writing into a structured, repeatable system. A modular schema (owned by the design team as markdown) captures every field a great brief needs; the AI skill helps a requester turn rough notes into a complete, on-brand brief and exports clean JSON that any downstream tool or workflow can consume. The template is the brand's definition of 'a good brief,' made self-serve.

The design/brand problem it solves: Creative work is only as good as the brief that starts it, and most briefs are a paragraph in a Slack thread. Fields go missing, success metrics are vague, tone is undefined — so designers spend the first day of every project reverse-engineering what was actually wanted. The cost isn't the brief; it's the rework downstream.

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30-second tour

If you only have half a minute, look here:

• ai-skills/brief-structuring-skill.md — the AI skill itself: a structured, markdown instruction set that turns brand rules into reliably on-brand output. This is the heart of the project.
• docs/design-system.md — the brand system as source of truth: voice, tone, type/color/layout and content rules the tool enforces.
• docs/PRD.md — the product thinking: problem, users, goals, and adoption metrics.
• docs/architecture.md — how it works: UI surface, the AI/model layer, and the prompt layer that binds them.
• extension/ + demo — the working Chrome extension (Manifest V3) with a popup UI, fully client-side. (Demo GIF: see docs/demo.gif once added.)

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Who it's for

Design & brand owners (who define the brief schema and standards) and non-designers — PMs, marketers, founders, stakeholders — who need to request work without knowing how to write a brief.

How it works (in one paragraph)

Brief Engine is a Chrome extension (Manifest V3) with a popup UI, fully client-side. The brand owner defines the voice and rules once as a markdown reference framework (see docs/design-system.md and ai-skills/brief-structuring-skill.md). At runtime, the tool composes those rules with the user's input into a structured prompt and sends it to Client-side structuring with optional Anthropic Claude assist (bring-your-own API key). The result is on-brand output that a non-designer can produce without ever seeing the underlying system.

• Input: Rough project notes, goals, audience, constraints, deadlines, and any reference links.
• Output: A complete, validated brief following the schema — rendered for humans and exported as structured JSON for downstream tools.

Install & use

1. Clone this repo.
2. In Chrome, open chrome://extensions, enable Developer mode, and click Load unpacked.
3. Select the extension/ folder.
4. Open the extension, add your Anthropic API key (stored locally, never sent to any server but Anthropic), and go.

No accounts. No backend. No analytics. See PRIVACY.md.

How it stays on-brand

On-brand output is not luck — it's a designed system:

1. The brand voice is encoded, not remembered. Tone, vocabulary, and rules live in docs/design-system.md as the single source of truth.
2. The AI skill enforces it. ai-skills/brief-structuring-skill.md is a structured instruction set with explicit constraints, examples, and guardrails — the same discipline you'd apply to a component library, applied to language.
3. Adaptation is bounded. The tool only flexes what should flex (phrasing and completeness); everything the brand must protect stays fixed.
4. Anyone can self-serve. Non-designers produce on-brand work because the design system is doing the work for them — invisibly.

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Why this exists (portfolio note)

This repo is part of a small suite of tools exploring one idea: the best design systems are increasingly invisible — AI skills, brand-encoded tools, and markdown reference frameworks that let anyone produce on-brand work. Shows a markdown reference framework operating as the single source of truth: the brief schema is the design standard, and the AI skill makes non-designers produce to that standard automatically.

Related tools in the suite:

• Message Variant Engine — one message, every audience, on-brand.
• Brief Engine — scattered inputs → structured, on-brand brief.
• Social Copy Multiplier — one message, platform-perfect everywhere.

License

MIT — see LICENSE.