A website from your brand guidelines
How SI is built to work from your brand guide and assets: logos placed as supplied, your colours, fonts and copy followed as rules, and nothing invented.
A brand guide exists so that every new thing looks like it came from the same place. A website built from one should follow it exactly where it's specific, and make careful, visible decisions where it isn't. With Laarpi, you attach the guide, the logos, the fonts, the photographs and the copy. SI, Laarpi's website agent, is built to read them before it plans anything, treat the brand files as rules, place your material as given, and never invent facts. Placing your own material on the site is in development in the private beta, so this page describes how it is built to work; the about page keeps the dated list of what ships. If you're building the whole site for a brand, the brand website use case covers the sections and the story.
What "on-brand" means for a website
Colours and a logo are the easy part. A guide written for print and social often says little about the things a website needs:
| The guide usually covers | The website also needs |
|---|---|
| Logo, clear space, minimum size | How the logo behaves in a sticky header and on a phone |
| Primary and secondary colours | Which colour is text, background, link, focus ring and button, with readable contrast |
| Typefaces and weights | A type scale for headlines, body, captions and data on screens from 390 to 1920 px wide |
| Tone of voice | Button labels, form errors, empty states |
| Photography style | Crops at different widths, loading order, alt text |
| Grid for print | A responsive grid, and what happens to it on a phone |
So "on-brand" for a site means two things: following every rule the guide states, and extending it into the gaps in a way the brand team would recognise.
What to upload
These are the formats and limits the intake is built around while it is in development.
| Your material | Accepted as | Limit per file |
|---|---|---|
| Brand guide | PDF, or a PowerPoint deck | 50 MB and 300 pages; decks 100 MB and 200 slides |
| Logos | SVG, or PNG with transparency | SVG 5 MB, PNG 30 MB |
| Brand fonts | WOFF2, WOFF, OTF, TTF | 5 MB |
| Photography | JPEG, PNG, WebP, AVIF, HEIC; GIF | 30 MB; GIF 10 MB |
| Copy | DOCX, TXT or Markdown, or pasted into the chat | DOCX 30 MB, text 5 MB |
| Price lists, specs | XLSX or CSV | 20 MB or 10 MB, up to 20,000 rows |
| A whole brand kit | One ZIP; each file inside is checked and sorted | 200 MB, 500 files |
| Your current site | A link you confirm is yours | Up to 50 pages and 150 images read |
You can attach up to 10 files and 5 links per message, from the home page or in the studio. Each file is checked by its actual contents, not its name, and gets a visible result: ready, or rejected with the reason. Video files, Figma links, legacy .doc, .xls and .ppt files and macro-enabled Office files aren't accepted yet.
What SI does with each
Every file gets a role, shown on its chip, which you can change with one click:
- Brand: rules the site must follow. Logos, fonts, and a PDF or deck named like a guide. Brand material overrides Laarpi's own defaults for colour, type and logo use.
- Content: goes on the site faithfully. Photos, documents, decks, sheets and your own site.
- Reference: inspiration only. A link to someone else's site, or a screenshot of one. It calibrates taste and is never copied.
SI must read every brand and content file before it writes the brief. That's enforced, not a guideline: the brief can't be saved while one is unread. The brief then names the material behind its key decisions, such as "colour roles from page 12 of your guide", so you can check them.
Where the guide is silent on something that changes the site, such as whether the logo may sit on a photograph, SI asks before deciding. Questions arrive as cards with options and can be left to SI. If the material already answers the question, it doesn't ask.
A note on decks: SI reads the text, speaker notes and embedded images of a PowerPoint file. It doesn't see the slide layouts as pictures, so when layout matters it asks for a PDF export.
Faithful where it matters
These are the rules SI works under, and the checks that enforce them:
- Logos are never redrawn. An SVG logo is copied as your file, with anything unsafe such as scripts removed. A PNG logo is copied pixel for pixel. The site's lint flags any drawing or text written to imitate the logo beside a real one.
- Photographs are placed as given. No crop unless you ask, no colour change, no generative edits, no upscaling. They're resized into web versions that are visually identical to the original.
- Fonts are your files, self-hosted on the site. SI notes once that this assumes your licence covers web use.
- Copy is used as written. SI writes new copy only where you have none.
- No invented facts. A price, date, number, quote, award or client logo on the page must match something in your material or your messages. A missing one becomes a visible placeholder, and the site can't be published until you fill it in or accept it.
- Alt text comes from your own description first, then captions in your documents, then a written description marked as editable.
Before and after
The proof of this feature is a guide's pages next to the site built from them. We haven't published one yet: it needs a real brand's permission to show both. When we have one, it goes here, with the guide pages, the brief and the finished site side by side. Until then, the how it works page shows the full build process.
Keeping it on-brand as you direct changes
After the first version, you direct the site in plain words or by pointing at an element. Your brand files travel with every request, so they stay in force for every edit: ask for "a louder headline" and SI works within your type and colour rules. Your newest instruction is the latest word, so if you ask for something the guide rules out, such as a colour outside the palette, say whether it's a one-off or a change to the rules. Every change is a new version, and earlier ones are kept.
Other tools that read brand files
Reading brand files isn't unique to Laarpi. Lovable offers design systems, and Anthropic's Claude Design reads design files and Office documents. Which fits depends on what you're making: a prototype, a slide deck, an app or a finished, published website. Laarpi's focus is the last of those, built from your material and published on your domain. For a product launch built the same way, see product launch page; for a company site, startup website.
