Hannah Baker is a facilitation educator based in Berlin. With over 15 years of experience helping product and design teams through personalized training and development, equipping them with the skills needed for leadership roles.
She built a successful practice on a shared voice. She wanted to shape her own.
Her LinkedIn voice was sharp and specific. I read months of her posts, her blog, and her website, then had Claude surface voice patterns across hundreds of posts. The value wasn't in either source alone. It was in comparing my manual notes against AI analysis. The voice was there. The identity underneath it wasn't.
Intellectual Punk
If your brand were a celebrity, who would it be?
Most people name musicians, actors, public figures. Hannah named Buckminster Fuller. John Oliver. Jerry Saltz. Marcel Duchamp. Donella Meadows. Gropius Bau. Sal Khan. Paula Scher. Josef Albers. Sol LeWitt.
Every single one connected to design, art, science, education, or systems thinking. This wasn't aspirational branding. It gave me an intellectual map. I spent hours reading about each person, building a concept map on FigJam. This part was entirely manual, the understanding had to be mine and shaped my approach entirely.
The threads between figures revealed patterns I hadn't consciously planned. The same qualities repeat across people who never met.
Shared thinking
Same voice, different dimensions
I created a voice and tone matrix. Two axes: Punk to Institutional, Intellectual to Visceral. Four quadrants, each mapped to specific content types. Hannah doesn't pick a quadrant. She knows which one she's in at any given moment based on medium and target audience. 4 dimensions for the same language.
Drag the marker to explore how position affects voice, visuals, and content strategy. Each quadrant is a real posture, not a compromise.
with touches of Leads with ideas, models, reframes. Content is conceptual before practical.
with touches of Diagrams, frameworks, concept maps. Structure is visible.
with touches of "Here's a model for thinking about this."
Encoding the brand
The matrix, principles, and concept graph gave me the knowledge base to build a brand meta skill. Everything is structured, referenced, and machine-readable. The meta skill doesn't generate content. It governs how content gets generated. Hannah now can create agent skills to generate marketing emails, social media copy, course material. Everything on brand.
Visuals needed their own system
Her voice needed visuals that express her punk intellectual identity. The direction we chose is inherently art-directed. You can't template it. And Hannah needs to move fast. The brand's own fifth principle was staring at me: Systems Over Artifacts. Instead of building an asset library. A photoshop plugin or already available tools could work, but they felt slow or don't really offer what Hannah needs.
We explored visual directions across sessions, this wasn't easy. Deep moodboarding, ranking ideas, generating artifacts. We were looking at Halftone textures, geometric shapes, big accent typography, colorful backgrounds, weird distorted shapes, cutouts, artsy compositions.
So, I just built a tool
Half-Toned is a web-based halftone image processor. Upload any photograph, adjust parameters, export a brand-consistent asset. No Photoshop required.
But is not just that. It has cloud storage so she can build her assets library, save presets and work on any device she wants. Different export combinations enable her to quickly get the assets she needs to layout the collages on Figma or whatever other design software.
The deliverables aren't a traditional brandbook.
The system is young. The website and assets are still rolling out. But the pattern already compounds. We encoded the brand with one skill; Hannah now has many. And she uses them beyond marketing: redesigning her course, her practice, building tools and artifacts that improve her classes.
They're a governance layer, a voice matrix, a concept graph, and a set of executable agent skills. I designed the instructions, the rules, and the tools. Hannah executes. The brand stays hers.