Why this matters for you specifically
You’re probably not short of design capability. There’s an agency somewhere, or a team who does this properly, or a freelancer you trust. The big things are handled.
What isn’t handled is everything underneath all of that, at the size nobody has time for. The branded graphic somebody needs by Thursday. The slide that has to get fixed before a 4pm review. The LinkedIn image for a post that’s already written. The vendor who needs the same instruction explained for the fourth time.
None of it justifies a brief. All of it lands on you. Your agency is still the right call for the big work. A connected tool covers what was always too small to brief.
How to actually teach Claude your brand
1. Connect one thing. Make it the folder your files already live in.
This is the step people skip, and it’s the one that changes everything else. Claude on its own is a text box. Connected, it can open your files and read what’s in them. That’s the difference between describing your brand and pointing at it.
Start with Google Drive. It’s free, almost everyone already has it, and there’s no seat to buy. Read access is enough for “this is my brand, this is my last deck, match it.”
I connected Figma, because my brand lives in Figma and I’m a designer. That’s not where most people should start, it costs money, and there are two Figma connections that do different jobs. I’ll cover that properly in a later post, because getting it wrong costs you a Saturday.
Gmail is the sleeper second. If most of your brand work is writing, a tool that can see how you wrote to that vendor in March is already doing the core job. About ten minutes. (I did mine on my phone, in a queue.)
2. Point it at your website and let it do the gathering
This is the part that saves you the boring afternoon. You don’t need to hunt through old files for your hex values. Your website already has them. Ask Claude to read your site and pull out the colors it actually uses, the font families it declares, and the way your copy actually sounds.
It’s good at this. Colors come out of the CSS exactly. Fonts come out by name. And it can tell you, from your own published words, that you write in short sentences, or that you never use exclamation marks, or that you say “team” far more than you say “client.”
Then write what comes back into a document, and put that document in the folder you just connected. It needs to live somewhere a machine can read it again, rather than somewhere you have to remember. (If you do have Figma, real variables and text styles are a better home. A doc still beats memory.) Twenty minutes of gathering, done in two.
3. Now decide what any of it means
This is the step no scrape can do for you, and it’s the whole job. Your website will tell Claude that you use a particular blue and a particular green. It can’t tell it that green means services and blue means software. That rule lives in your head, and until you write it down, every asset anyone makes is a coin flip.
So write the rules, not the swatches:
Color, with a reason. Not “our green is 7DE085.” Instead, “green is for services, blue is for the product, and they never appear as equals in the same layout.” A rule written as a sentence propagates to pages you haven’t designed yet. A swatch doesn’t.
Type, by name and by job. Which weight is a headline, which is body, which one you never use. Mine is three weights and no bold, which surprises people.
Voice, in three sentences, including what you never say. The “never” is the useful half. Mine includes no em dashes, which I’d been overusing for a year without noticing. If you can’t fill in that third one, stop. That isn’t a gap in your tooling.
4. Put the rest of your files where it can reach them
One folder. One link. Your logo files, your templates, your last three decks, the brand PDF if you have one.
The scrape gets you your website. It doesn’t get you the deck template you actually build from every week. That has to live somewhere reachable, and reachable means a real folder with a real link, not an attachment in an email from February.
5. Write down the one rule you repeat most
Every brand has one. The thing you say to every vendor, every new hire, every freelancer, on every project. Mine is that green means services. Yours might be that the logo never sits on a photograph, or that you never say “solutions,” or that headlines are always sentence case. Write it at the top of the folder. That single sentence will do more work than any file in it.
The part I’m not going to pretend about
This only works if your brand exists as something a machine can read. Real files with real type styles, and rules written down somewhere other than in your head. If your brand lives in a PDF that says “our blue is a confident blue,” no connected tool is going to help you. It’ll just be wrong faster.
That’s worth knowing before you spend an afternoon on setup. It’s also, if I’m honest, the most useful thing that comes out of doing this. The setup doesn’t create the gaps. It just shows you where they already were.
What’s next
Next up, what an MCP actually is, in plain language, because “connector” is doing a lot of hiding in that word. Then connecting your first one properly. Then the two Figma connections, and which one you actually want.
If you want those as they land, the BioBrand newsletter is where they go first.
Meg
