Brand vs product, pick a register

See the divergence

Same element, one register each. A newsletter signup, twice.

Why register matters

Every design task belongs to one of two worlds:

• Brand is where design IS the product. Marketing sites, landing pages, portfolios, long-form content, campaign surfaces. Distinctiveness is the bar. Fonts, motion, density, and color all push toward “this looks like nothing else in the category.”
• Product is where design SERVES the product. App UI, admin, dashboards, tools. Earned familiarity is the bar. Fluent users of Linear, Figma, Notion, Raycast, or Stripe should trust the output on sight.

If you ask the same AI to design a dashboard and a campaign page without naming which world, you’ll get the average of the two. Brand surfaces will feel too careful. Product surfaces will feel too precious. Register is how Impeccable avoids that.

Impeccable tracks register as a single field in PRODUCT.md:

## Register

product

That is it: a bare value, brand or product. Every command that does register-sensitive work (typeset, animate, colorize, layout, bolder, quieter, delight) loads a different reference file based on what it finds here.

How the two worlds diverge

This is not an exhaustive list, the full divergence lives in the brand.md and product.md reference files, but the shape of the difference:

Dimension	Brand	Product
Type lanes	Editorial-magazine, luxury, brutalist, consumer-warm, tech-minimal, all available. Swing.	Tighter set: neutral sans + optional mono, sized for dense reading, fluid type reserved for marketing surfaces.
Motion	Choreographed entrances, scroll-driven sequences, decorative moments earn their place.	Restrained. State changes only. Animation serves feedback, not atmosphere.
Color	Full palette, Committed, or Drenched are all on the table.	Restrained by default. Accents carry meaning; color is not decoration.
Density	Whatever the narrative wants. Generous whitespace or packed rule-divided columns both valid.	Comfortable to dense. Every pixel earns its place.
References	Real-world, from the right lane. Klim specimen pages or Broadsheet masthead, not “modern SaaS”.	Category best-tool. Linear, Figma, Notion, Raycast, Stripe.

The same command, /impeccable typeset, pulls from different fonts in the two worlds. The same command, /impeccable animate, picks different motion vocabularies. The same command, /impeccable layout, assumes different density defaults. You do not re-learn the command: you answer the register question once, and the command adapts.

Step 1. Decide or inherit

If you haven’t run /impeccable teach yet, run it now. The first question is about register:

/impeccable teach

Teach scans your codebase first and forms a hypothesis: routes like /, /pricing, /blog, hero sections, scroll-driven content point toward brand. Routes like /app, /dashboard, /settings, forms and tables point toward product. It leads with the hypothesis rather than starting cold:

From the codebase, this looks like a product surface, does that match your intent, or should we treat it differently?

If the project genuinely spans both (a product with a big marketing landing), teach asks which register describes the primary surface. Register is per-project, not per-page, but you can override it per task when needed.

Step 2. Verify the register landed

Open PRODUCT.md and look for the ## Register section. It should carry a bare value, not prose:

## Register

brand

If the section is missing (you’re on an older PRODUCT.md from pre-v3.0), re-run /impeccable teach. It will detect the gap and add the field without re-interviewing you on everything else.

Step 3. Override per task when you need to

Most of the time, register is set once and forgotten. But a product project might occasionally need a single brand surface (a launch landing, an investor one-pager) without flipping the whole project.

You have two options:

• Name it in the brief. “/impeccable craft a launch landing for v2, brand register for this one page.” The skill honors the override for that task only.
• Set a per-surface register. If the override is lasting, add a short note in PRODUCT.md under an explicit section: ## Register overrides: /launch is brand. Commands that read PRODUCT.md will respect it.

What to try next

• Run a command that is register-sensitive and watch the divergence: /impeccable typeset the pricing page on a product project vs. a brand project will pick different type families, different scale ratios, and different pairings.
• Pair with getting started if you haven’t installed Impeccable yet.
• Reach for /impeccable document after teach to capture the visual side (colors, components) into DESIGN.md.

Common issues

• Register keeps slipping the wrong way. If you set product but commands keep producing brand-feeling output, check that PRODUCT.md is at the project root and the ## Register section has a bare value (no prose, no explanation, just the word). Commands can only read what is there.
• The hypothesis teach formed is wrong. Disagree in the answer. Teach is asking, not telling.
• A project is genuinely 50/50. Pick the primary surface, then use per-task overrides for the minority one. Trying to average the two in PRODUCT.md produces worse output than committing to one.