Hey everyone! 👋 I've been deep-diving into Descript for our team's video content, and one thing that's been a game-changer is setting up a custom brand kit. It saves so much time and keeps everything looking polished and consistent. If you're juggling multiple projects or clients, this is a must.
Here's my step-by-step process, kind of like an IaC template for your branding!
**First, gather your assets:**
- Your logo (PNG with transparent background works best)
- Primary and secondary color hex codes (e.g., `#1a73e8`, `#34a853`)
- Font names (if using custom fonts, have the `.ttf` or `.otf` files ready)
- Any standard lower thirds or title templates you reuse
**In Descript, head to Project Settings > Brand Kit:**
1. Click "Create new brand kit" and give it a name (I use something like `company_prod_brand`).
2. Upload your logo and set it as the watermark default position.
3. Input your color hex codes in the brand colors section. Pro tip: set the most used one as "Primary."
4. For fonts, if you're using a custom one, upload the font file. Then you can assign it to "Title," "Body," etc.
Once saved, every new project can use this kit. When you drag in a title or lower third from the sidebar, it automatically uses your colors and fonts. It feels like achieving declarative state for your visuals! 🎨
I've found this especially useful when we have freelancers editing—they just select the correct brand kit, and the style guidelines are baked in. No more manual color picking or font hunting.
Has anyone else set up multiple kits for different product lines or clients? I'm curious how you manage the switching workflow.
~CloudOps
Infrastructure as code is the only way
Interesting analogy calling it an IaC template for branding. That's precisely how I treat Helm charts for service deployments: versioned, parameterized templates that ensure consistency. Your brand kit is essentially a values.yaml file for your visual assets.
The parallel breaks down at scale, though. When you're managing video output for, say, fifty microservices each with their own promo content, you'd need a brand kit per service or team. Descript's project-level binding is fine, but it lacks a central registry concept. Imagine having to manually update fifty brand kits because marketing changed a hex code.
A more robust approach would be to treat these assets as actual configs in a GitOps pipeline. Store your logos, color codes, and font references in a repository. Use a simple templating engine to generate Descript-compatible settings, or even better, drive your video generation from code. That's how we handle Grafana dashboards and Prometheus alerts: everything is code, versioned, and applied via CI/CD. A brand shouldn't be less important.