Take brand colors from evidence

Brand colors are written down somewhere. Your job is to find where, and copy them exactly.

Ask someone what color a brand is and they'll describe how it feels. Ask an AI model to read it off a screenshot and you may get a confident hex code it estimated. Neither is evidence. A brand color is a value someone chose, and it's recorded in a file.

Look in three places. A brand guide, if the client has one, is the most direct statement of intent, but check it's the current one: a guide from before a rebrand is history. Artwork saved as SVG holds exact values in its fill and stroke attributes. The site's CSS holds the colors actually in use. And a photograph is never a source, however good it looks.

The bakery has no brand guide, but it has the printer's proof for its paper bags, saved as SVG. Open it in any text editor and the drawing turns back into text. Read the fill on each part. The paper and its outline have values of their own. The two lines of printed words both say C9A86A. That's the gold, exactly as the printer set it, and the proof says the owner approved it on 6 October.

For the CSS, an agent saves a lot of squinting. This prompt asks for every color value on the bakery's old one-page site, how often it appears, and where. And it tells the agent not to round or merge, because two near-identical greens might be a decision or a mistake, and you need to see both.

Here's the stylesheet, and the list that comes back. Frequency and selector tell you a lot. A color on every button and heading is probably the brand. A gray used once in the footer is probably a template's leftover default. On this site, every value is a default: dark gray text, a stock link blue, a footer gray. The awning green appears nowhere, and neither does the gold. So the old site tells you only that the brand never made it onto the page.

Here's why photos are out. The awning is painted dark green. Pick it from a photo in three places and you get three greens. Each one is the paint, plus the light, plus the phone camera's white balance, plus compression. A photo tells you which color to go looking for. It never gives you the value. The bakery has nothing better yet, so its green is read off the photo, in open shade, and marked provisional until the sign-maker's reference arrives.

Often the evidence disagrees with itself. The logo says one green and the buttons use another, a digit apart. Don't quietly pick one. Record both with their sources and ask the client which is right. Whatever they answer goes into your record as a source of its own, with a date.

The bakery's green is the thin case: no artwork file, no guide, a site built from defaults. So ask for the original file, and ask who made it: designers and sign-makers keep their references. A printer's proof or a paint order often names the exact color; that's where the gold came from. If nothing turns up, choose the best value you have, mark it provisional, and tell the client. Provisional is honest. A confident guess isn't.

This is the record that lives in the project. Every color has its value, a source precise enough to reopen, and a note on how far to trust it. The open question is written down instead of settled by eye. When you build color roles and check contrast, you start from this file, and nobody has to remember where a green came from.

A color without a source is a guess with a hex code.