Brand.ai - Create a style guide & integrate with Sketch, Slack, & Gulp

@ehudhal Yeah, this is a great approach. Traditional style guides are throwaway mastubatory jokes instead of guardrails, which you're basically baking into existing workflows. Awesome way to shape enterprise behavior.

@andreasduess thanks for checking it out and for your feedback. We're working on expanding the font selection, and I'll update here when it goes live. I'd love to hear more about your creative process. Would you be willing to share some insights offline?

@ehudhal of course. I am sorry to be less than enthusiastic about something you guys worked hard on, but I do think the limitations outweigh the utility here, starting with, but not ending with, the fonts. Style guides are more than a logo and a font, as I am certain you are aware, and currently it doesn't look like that complexity is accommodated. I like the idea of keeping a living document online, but that is something easily achieved with existing tools that do not come with an additional price tag. In fact, it is something we already do, with tools targeted to the clients needs. Google docs, MS docs, Wordpress with a custom page template, various Adobe products as well as project management software such as asana can achieve a more flexible result from within an existing framework of tools. Think about it, your $10/month per brand competes with $10/month for a full office suite from both MS and Google, it competes with the insane usefulness of Slack for $5/month, it competes with access to all the music in the world from Spotify. I'm happy to pay for great software that makes problems go away, but currently this feels to me like an, expensive and poorly featured, solution in search of a problem.

@andreasduess you have a designer that can customize a style guide in just 10 minutes?

@rigadoohaus my apologies for being less than clear. What I meant to say is that we have templates that we have built specifically for Corporate Identity presentations and sharing. These templates, in a variety of formats ranging from google docs to Wordpress pages to (gasp) PowerPoint slides are indeed customizable with very little time investment. Setting them up took a little longer.

@andreasduess thanks for sharing this and the feedback. That's helpful.

@katoree we currently support export to SAAS, Less, and Stylus, and we're adding export to JSON, YAML, and XML formats. We also offer Gulp and Grunt integrations, so you can add a task to your build script, and update your application style automatically with any changes. On the designer end, we're adding Photoshop integration very soon. We've prepared a survey that lists multiple integrations that we're considering next. Click the 'Cast Your Vote' link on the homepage to help us prioritize :)

@masondwear the pricing is per brand, and we currently support a single brand per user. If you're looking to manage multiple brands, let's talk.

@ehudhal We do a lot of client work so it would be nice to have an enterprise option with a tiered amount of brands and/or unlimited.

@masondwear got it. Definitely on our roadmap. Can I reach out to ask a few questions to guide the development?

@ehudhal Of course! Mason@byprimer.co

@masondwear we now support multiple organizations, as well as multiple style guides per organization. We've also added support for icons, images, and improved the Sketch integration (see brand.ai/sketch) I'd love to know what you think.

@tkuva We're adding support for more fonts sources. Are you using a subscription font service like TypeKit? Self-hosting?

@ehudhal that's great! we're self-hosting.

@tkuva Tatyana, you can now upload your font family to Brand.ai, or select your fonts from Typekit and fonts.com

@ehudhal works great, thanks. Another question - what about Sketch/Zeplin integration? How can I reference the font styles I defined in Brand.io in my Zeplin specs? I can obviously annotate with notes but that's way too time consuming.

@tkuva I don't believe there's an easy way to integrate. Something for us to look into.

@sean_urphy thanks for checking it out. We'll take a look at the opacity issues. Pre-set defaults make a lot of sense. We'll update this post when we make these available.

@sean_urphy Opacity colors issue is fixed. Thanks again for reporting.

@lewis_lin We're working on a blog post to answer this, but in the meantime, I'd start with http://bradfrost.com/blog/post/s... Also, http://styleguides.io offers a great window to the world of style guides.