Branding a primitive
Nobody installs a sync library just because it exists, so even a primitive needs a brand.
TrueSeal is the E2EE sync primitive I keep mentioning. It's a library and a relay, with no UI and no users of its own. Branding for that sounded like fluff to me. A primitive needs good docs and a clean API, and branding is for apps people look at.
But my job with this project is to put something out and convince people to use it. Nobody installs a sync library because it exists. A dev has to land on the home page, believe it solves their problem and trust it with their user data, and all of that happens before they ever see the API. Deciding what that page says, and how it sounds, is branding. So a primitive needs it as much as an app does.
When I needed to start working on the docs site, I tried one shoting a few prototypes with an agent. I had four home page variants built and I didn't love any of them.
A monochrome one was too boring, I didn't know where to look. The colorful one had rounded cards and gradients, which didn't fit a building block. I figured the problem was visual, so I did a proper brand discovery: purpose, positioning, audience, personality, voice, and only then the look.
Most of what came out of it had nothing to do with colors, and that's the part a primitive needs.
# Positioning: the competitor is giving up
One of the questions was who TrueSeal competes with. I would've expected product names to be the answer, but the main reason for TrueSeal to exist was that most devs bolt encryption onto whatever sync stack they already have, which sounds like the answer. But when I thought about what I'd actually tell a dev halfway through that, it was "Don't give up on privacy. Use this, it's free" (free in effort, mostly).
Because that's the real fear. Pairing, key sharing, recovery... if you have to build all of that yourself it's a lot of work, so most people won't. They'll ship Firestore unencrypted and move on. That's the thing I'm up against, a perfectly reasonable dev who settles.
So the pitch is that privacy shouldn't be a project you take on. In my head the dev lists what their app does and says "and it is fully private" at the end, almost as an afterthought.
# Personality: no "trust us", no "I know better"
A couple of the candidate lines leaned on "don't trust anyone". Which is kind of my whole temperament, I just don't like "trust us", it's not good enough for me. But I can't tell you to trust no one and in the same breath ask you to trust me. So that whole tone went out. Same with the more rebellious personality options, they all sounded like "I know better", and I don't want this thing to ever sound like that.
# The look came last
The stuff I already liked in the prototypes, square corners and the blinking cursor, finally had a reason behind it. And the first home page built on top of the brandbook was the first one I said "I love it" to.