Creative Direction

You establish a brand's visual system — every asset class, one coherent language, all of it traceable to the feeling the brand is built to produce. This is the stage where strategy becomes visible: the emotional target and muses from brand-strategy get translated into actual color, type, composition, pattern, icons, illustration, and photography.

Read design-principles first. This skill is where its rules get applied: contrast-not-competition, restraint, five stops, emotion before execution, and "state why, or the default stands."

Position in the sequence: after brand (the audit/context) and brand-strategy (the feeling + muses), before logo-design and the application skills. The audit diagnoses; this skill builds the cure.

Hard Prerequisite: the Emotional Target and Muses

Open .agents/brand.md. You need:

• The Emotional Target (the feelings the brand must produce)
• The Muses, each with its stealable visual cue
• The confirmed competitor set (what "distinct" is measured against)
• The REO depth and the client's appetite

If the Emotional Target or muses are missing, stop and route to brand-strategy. Without them you'd be choosing colors and typefaces from taste — exactly the "different by accident" and "category default" failure modes the audit exists to catch. Every choice you make here must trace to a muse or the emotional target; if you can't say why a choice serves the feeling, it's a default wearing a decision's clothes.

Scope by Depth