Brand

Your brand is how your workspace looks and sounds: a logo, a few colours, a font for headings and one for body text, and a short description of how documents should look and how text should read. You set it up once. From then on every PDF, Word file, slide deck, page and app Stedia makes uses it, whether you asked in chat or a schedule wrote it overnight.

Open Resources → Brand. Only owners and admins can set the brand up or change it; everyone else sees it read-only.

Three ways to startCopy Anchor Link

The first step offers three starts. Whichever you pick, Stedia shows what it found before anything is saved, each part marked as taken over or as something to check. Then you go through the steps, remove what isn't yours and change what is off.

• Read website. Enter its address and Stedia reads that page, following it if it moves to another address. It takes the logo, and the colour of the logo first, because a site's buttons often use a generic colour. It also reads the colours the page and its stylesheets name as brand colours and the fonts it declares, and drafts how your documents should look and how your text sounds, from the page's own words and in the language you use Stedia in.
• Upload a brand guide. Upload your brand guidelines as a PDF up to 50 MB, or a text file or a DESIGN.md up to 1 MB. Stedia takes the colours, fonts, look and voice the guide describes. A PDF over 4 MB is read in your browser, and only its text is sent. A scanned PDF has no text to read. A DESIGN.md from another tool is read exactly, without guessing. A guide gives no logo: upload it in the next step.
• Set up by hand. Start from Stedia's own look and set the name, logo, colours, fonts and voice yourself.

A few things reading a website cannot do:

• A logo drawn straight into the page's code is read when the page names it as its logo or it links to the home page. Any other one cannot be read; upload it instead.
• When the logo is black, white or grey and the page shows no clear brand colour, Stedia says so and puts a dark tone in its place. Pick your colour in the next step if your brand has one.
• Some sites refuse automated visitors. Then start from a guide or by hand.

LogoCopy Anchor Link

There are three slots:

• The full logo, with symbol and name, sits at the top of the first page of documents and Word files, on the title slide, and where a page asks for it.
• The mark, the symbol alone, takes the full logo's place where none is set. A site's square icon fills the mark.
• The logo for dark backgrounds is your full logo in light colours. Slides and pages with a dark background use it. Without one, Stedia puts your logo on a light plate there so it stays visible.

Logos are PNG, JPEG or SVG files up to 2 MB. An SVG is turned into a PNG, and only its shapes, colours and gradients are kept: effects such as filters, embedded images and links are left out. A brand keeps at most 4 logo files, and replacing a logo frees the old one's place. After an upload, Use colours from logo offers the logo's own colours for the primary and the highlight.

ColoursCopy Anchor Link

Type or paste a colour code, or pick one with the swatch.

• Primary: the document title and headings, links, and the bars of a chart.
• Text: body text.
• Background: slides and pages. Documents and Word files stay on white paper.
• Highlight: a second colour, for a chart's second series and for accents on pages.
• More colours: up to six named colours of your own. Pages use them for categories and accents, and the DESIGN.md lists them.

A colour that would be hard to read where it sits is not swapped for another: Stedia uses a darker or lighter tone of the same colour. A yellow primary becomes a mustard in a document, and links get a tone dark enough to read as text. Charts with three or more series keep a palette that stays readable for colour-blind readers, toned to stand out on a coloured slide.

FontsCopy Anchor Link

Stedia ships two fonts of its own, Instrument Sans and Libertinus Serif. If your site uses one of them, Stedia picks it and there is nothing to upload. To use another font, upload its files as TTF or OTF, up to 4 MB each and 8 files in all. A font named like one of Stedia's own fonts is refused.

Before you upload, you confirm that your licence allows embedding the font in documents. That matters: a PDF or Word file carries the font to everyone who opens it. A font whose licence forbids embedding, or only allows embedding the whole font, is refused, as is a font with no outlines. A font licensed for print and preview only is used in PDFs and slides and left out of Word files and pages.

A font your website uses is only named in the setup. A site's licence to show a web font is not a licence to embed it in documents, so you upload the files yourself. Until you do, documents use Stedia's own fonts.

Word files embed one static, upright cut of your font and draw bold and italic from it. Word cannot use a variable font or an OTF with PostScript outlines, so Word files set that face in Calibri or Cambria; upload a static TTF to change that. A family without a regular, bold or italic cut prints that text in the cut it has. The setup warns about each. Pages embed your fonts up to 3 MB in all, regular cuts first.

Voice and lookCopy Anchor Link

Describe how documents should look and how text should sound, and add rules for what to do and what to avoid. Examples and a few tone presets help when you start from nothing. Stedia carries your look, your tone and the first four rules each way into every conversation and scheduled run.

What changesCopy Anchor Link

• Documents without their own stationery are set in your colours and fonts, with your logo on the first page.
• Documents on a stationery keep that stationery's layout, colours and logo, and their headings use your heading font. A new stationery starts in your colours. In the stationery studio, Use brand colours copies them into an existing design, and the body face can be set to your brand font. The studio preview shows exactly what a document on that design gets.
• Word files take your colours, your logo and, where Word can use them, your fonts. On a stationery they follow the stationery, as the PDF does.
• Slide decks take your colours, fonts and background, with your logo on the title slide.
• Pages Stedia designs use your colours, fonts, background and logo.
• Apps Stedia builds use your logo, colours and fonts.
• Stedia writes and lays out in your brand in every conversation and every scheduled run.

Files Stedia already made stay as they were.

Change or remove your brandCopy Anchor Link

Once saved, each part of the brand has its own Edit button: logo, colours, fonts, and voice and look. Changes show in the preview straight away and are saved with Save. Leaving with unsaved changes, by Cancel, the way back or another tab, asks first, and files you uploaded during that edit are removed again. If another admin saves while you edit, Stedia says so and offers to load the latest brand.

Read website again reads your site once more and keeps what you saved: for each part, choose the website's version or keep yours. A brand set up without a website offers Read a website instead. A font the saved brand still uses cannot be removed until you choose another.

Remove brand deletes the brand and its files. New documents return to Stedia's own look; files already made stay as they were.

DESIGN.mdCopy Anchor Link

When you save, Stedia writes a DESIGN.md: a plain text description of your brand that other design tools understand. Its first half lists your colours and fonts as you set them, with standard sizes, corners and spacing. Its second half explains how to use them, in the language you use Stedia in. Where you described no voice or look, it describes none.

Stedia itself works from your brand directly; the DESIGN.md is for other tools. Download it from the brand page and hand it to any tool that designs for you.