The ninetieth application, not the first.
Identity work is what goes in a portfolio. Social graphics, decks and one pagers are what the brand actually spends its life as. Below is the everyday output, and one piece rebuilt to show what the system does to it.
AA feed row designed as one image
Three posts that butt together into a single banner across the top of the profile. They have to work twice: as one composition when someone lands on the grid, and as three separate posts when they arrive one at a time in a feed. The constraint is that Instagram fills the row right to left, so they ship in reverse order.
One accent per panel, one condensed face for the statement, one weight for the supporting line. The centre panel carries the only image because a row of three with three focal points has no centre at all.
BThe same asset, put back on its own rules
This one is here because of what it argues, not because it is pretty. The Steel Soul system specifies Cormorant Garamond for headlines, DM Sans for body, a two family limit, and Cornflower Blue used once per design for highlights and CTAs. The story on the left uses none of it. It was made before the system existed and never went back.
That is the failure I keep describing, caught in my own work. The rebuild changes no copy and no photography. It sets the headline in the specified face, drops a tiled watermark that was never in the palette, puts the image rail on a real measure, and spends the single accent on the one thing that wants a click.
Built as a template rather than a file. Swap the four images and the six text blocks and the grid, type scale and single accent hold, so the next twenty posts start consistent instead of being corrected afterwards.
- Headline
- Cormorant Garamond
- Body
- DM Sans
- Families
- Two, the limit
- Accent
- #667eea, once