Baseline

I added color shades and tints based on brand colors. This opens up more doors in auto-generated code and design options.

For example the lightest color tint of your primary color can be used for the background color of the brand guide and the darkest shade can be used for text. This can easily give your websites a more branded feel rather than using just plain black and white.

Now I can also add these shades and tints to the generated code examples for CSS, Tailwind and Sass. Making it easy to copy it over to your preferred stack. This is still on the todo list though.

A week ago, I quietly launched Baselines MVP, which includes only a Brand Guide creator, and made my first seven sales. Having this validation is very satisfying, and I'm excited about where things are going.

Soft Launch Results

So far, the result has been overwhelmingly positive; over 1000 brand guides have been created using the brand guide creation flow — 7 signups to paid plans. And lot's of suggestions from those who tried it out.

Most people seem to be just trying it out since many of the brands completed have all the default options set, but that's something I expected and wanted. I focused on making it easy to do so they can get a feel for how it works.

Next up

The most requested feature was custom font uploads. I only had Google Fonts to begin with since it was easier to build it with just that one option, and I didn't want to spend too much time on it before validating the product. But I knew custom font uploads would be a crucial feature since I couldn't even create a proper brand guide for Baseline itself, because the font I'm using, Futura, isn't on Google Fonts. This week I spent my evenings adding custom font uploads and launched it yesterday!

The brand guide is just the first step in my vision. It sets the foundation for what's to come. I'm planning to add an asset creation tool that lets you create things like Instagram posts that are automatically branded with your brand assets, like logos, colors, fonts, and so on. This should save busy creators and marketers a lot of effort on asset creation and automatically align with your brand.

I'm happy where things are headed

I always prepare for the worst when I'm launching something and expect people to hate it. However, I'm thrilled that so far, people have been nothing but positive, and I'm very excited to bring them even more powerful tools that build on top of this brand guide. I'm holding off on an official launch until I add the asset creation tool.

I took a part of the brand guide builder I'm working on and made it a stand alone tool. I thought it might be useful to some people bring some attention to the project I'm working on. So far it has done exactly that, I posted in a couple of places on reddit and they have received almost 1000 upvotes combined and 40 people signed up to the newsletter.

Here is the tool if anyone here is interested in checking it out: https://baseline.is/tools/type-scale-generator/

The Brandguide is the first "tool" in the Baseline suite. It will let you create a brand guide / style guide / brand book or whatever you prefer to call it in under a minute. You can then refer to it in order to keep your brand consistent.

It will also let you download your assets, share your brand guide with the world, copy css for typography, colors, etc..

I'll hopefully introduce it to the first users in August 2020. We will see how that goes.