How AthenAI builds your brand kit

A brand kit is the set of visual and verbal identifiers that make your business look and sound like itself across surfaces — palette, typography, logo direction, voice, tone. AthenAI generates one for you during onboarding so your site, your email templates, your PDFs, and your in-app surfaces all line up out of the gate.

Universal brand-kit generation — every tier, including Free. AthenAI is rolling out real AI logo, wordmark, and full identity generation as a universal capability across every tier. Free customers get the same brand-kit asset bundle (logo, wordmark, palette, typography, voice) as paid customers — there’s no logo-tier paywall. The capability is in active deployment (~2.5 athenai-platform dev-days remaining). During rollout, the in-product demo renders your business name as styled text where the AI logo will sit; once rollout completes, all tenants (Free included) receive the full asset bundle automatically. After signup, the brand kit is yours to edit.

How that brand kit gets built depends on which path you came in through.

TL;DR

Universal across tiers (rolling out): real AI logo + wordmark + full identity for every tier including Free. No logo paywall.
Create path: AthenAI generates a brand kit from scratch using your business idea, ICP, and tone preferences. Greenfield generation, no existing brand to reference.
Grow path: AthenAI extracts your existing brand from your existing site (palette, typography, logo, copy patterns, sections, assets). This is the brand-fork chain. Grow-only — Create users have nothing to fork from.
Buy path: Brand kit isn’t generated at onboarding (you don’t own the business yet). Once a deal closes and you upgrade, you can either keep the existing brand (run brand-fork against the acquired site) or generate fresh.

What’s in a brand kit

Element	What it is	Source on Create	Source on Grow
Palette	Primary, accent, dark, light, muted (hex)	LLM-generated from idea + tone	Extracted from your site’s CSS
Typography	Heading + body font pairing (Google Fonts)	LLM-paired to brand vibe	Detected from your site’s `font-family` declarations
Logo + wordmark	Real AI-generated logo mark, wordmark, and full identity bundle (universal across tiers)	AI-generated concept rendered to SVG / PNG	Extracted logo (SVG / PNG) from your site — supplemented with refreshed marks if your verdict is Migrate or Rebuild
Voice & tone	One-liner brand voice descriptor + tone notes	LLM-generated from your audience and goals	Inferred from your existing site copy
Tagline	Short value-prop line	LLM-generated	Extracted from hero/header on your site

Everything is editable. AthenAI’s first draft is a draft.

Create path — greenfield generation

If you came in through Create, you don’t have an existing brand for AthenAI to fork. So at Step 4 of the wizard, AthenAI generates one from scratch using:

The business idea you picked at Step 2.
The audience and positioning from Step 3 (Strategy).
A short tone signal at Step 4 — something like warm and casual, premium and quiet, or loud and punchy. (The exact wizard prompt may evolve; the example phrases here are illustrative, not literal copy.)

You’ll see one brand concept at a time. You can regenerate to see another option, or accept what’s on screen and move on.

What you actually get (post-rollout — see the universal-rollout note at the top of this article):

A palette with five hexes (primary, accent, dark, light, muted), tested for WCAG AA contrast.
A font pairing from Google Fonts — one heading face, one body face. (We avoid weird, paid, or hard-to-license fonts on purpose.)
A real AI-generated logo + wordmark + full identity bundle rendered to SVG / PNG, sized for retina + print. Universal across tiers (Free included).
A tagline and voice descriptor generated from your strategy inputs.

You can edit any of it after onboarding — palette swaps, font swaps, copy swaps, logo replacement (upload your own if you have one).

Grow path — brand fork from your existing site

If you came in through Grow, AthenAI starts by crawling your existing site at Step 1. The crawl pulls down the rendered HTML, the CSS, the images, and the copy. From that, the brand-fork chain extracts a brand kit that mirrors what your business already looks like.

This is the part that’s different from Create. The brand kit isn’t invented; it’s recovered.

What gets extracted

What	How
Palette	We scan your CSS for color declarations, score them by frequency and prominence (in-hero vs. footer-only), and pick the five most-used in canonical roles.
Typography	We pull `font-family` declarations from your computed styles, identify the heading and body faces, and map them to Google Fonts equivalents.
Logo	If your site has a clear logo in the header (SVG or PNG), we capture it. If it’s an `<img>` tag with sensible alt text, we re-host it.
Sections	The crawler identifies your site’s section structure (hero, features, pricing, testimonials, footer) and recreates the layout grammar in the AthenAI Astro template.
Copy patterns	Headline tone, CTA voice, body length — we sample your existing copy so the new pages feel like extensions of your existing voice.

Confidence scoring

Brand-fork extraction isn’t always clean. Sometimes a site has a brand-confused CSS soup; sometimes the logo is locked behind a JavaScript-rendered header that didn’t come down with the crawl; sometimes the copy is so generic it doesn’t have a clear voice signal.

When the extraction confidence is low, the brand-fork chain marks the snapshot as brand-extraction-failed and routes it to an operator review queue. What that means for you:

You’ll get a notification (in chat and on your dashboard) that the auto-extraction wasn’t high-confidence.
An operator on AthenAI’s side reviews the snapshot, fills in or corrects the missing fields manually (typically within one business day), and re-runs the chain.
Once the manual pass clears, you continue to the next step of onboarding.

This is why your audit can occasionally take a few extra hours on Grow — when a site has unusual CSS or a JS-heavy header, we’d rather pause and have a human look than ship you a brand kit that’s wrong.

Site-verdict and what gets done with the extraction

The Grow audit verdict (Keep / Optimize / Migrate / Rebuild) shapes how the extracted brand gets used:

Keep — your site’s already good. We extract the brand to use across AthenAI’s surfaces (your tenant pages in the dashboard, email templates, PDF exports), but we don’t rebuild your actual site.
Optimize — we extract the brand and then also generate a new AthenAI site that reuses your brand exactly. You get a parallel “AthenAI version” of your site to A/B against the existing one.
Migrate / Rebuild — your audit flagged your existing site as the problem. We extract what’s salvageable (logo, palette if it’s good) but generate a refreshed brand kit on top. You’ll see a side-by-side: original brand vs. proposed refresh, and you choose.

For more on the audit verdicts: /help/paths/.

When extraction fails or you want to override

You always have the override.

Override during onboarding

After the brand-fork extraction completes, the Brand step shows you what was pulled. Three paths:

Accept and continue — looks right, ship it.
Edit inline — swap a hex value, swap a font, replace the logo by uploading your own. AthenAI keeps the rest of the extraction.
Throw it out and generate fresh — if the extraction came back wrong (or your existing site had no brand worth keeping), you can ask AthenAI to ignore the fork and generate a greenfield brand kit instead. Same generator the Create path uses.

Override after onboarding

After you’re in the platform, brand kit edits live in Settings → Brand Kit. You can:

Edit colors, fonts, voice, tagline.
Upload a new logo (SVG or PNG; PNG is rasterized by AthenAI to multiple sizes for retina + print use).
Reset to the original extraction (if you’ve made changes you regret).

Changes propagate to your AthenAI surfaces (site, email templates, PDF exports) on the next render — usually within a few minutes.

What brand kit doesn’t do (yet)

Honest scope:

No automatic brand audit. AthenAI doesn’t tell you “your existing brand is bad.” If you have a brand, brand-fork preserves it. If you want a brand redesign, ask in chat — that’s a Custom-tier engagement (or a manual Settings → Brand Kit replacement).
No font hosting. AthenAI uses Google Fonts. If your existing brand uses a paid foundry font (Adobe Fonts, Hoefler, MyFonts), the Google-Fonts equivalent is what we’ll match — usually 90% of the way there. If you need the exact original font on your AthenAI surfaces, that’s roadmap (font hosting requires a separate licensing flow).
No multi-brand on one tenant. One brand kit per tenant. If you run multiple businesses with different brands, each business gets its own AthenAI tenant (Custom tier supports multi-subaccount).
No brand re-fork on demand from your live site post-launch. Once you’re past onboarding, AthenAI’s brand kit is yours (not a periodic copy of your old site). If your old site changes, your AthenAI brand kit doesn’t auto-update — you edit it in Settings.

Why we extract instead of regenerate (Grow path)

Most onboarding tools that “build you a site” generate a fresh visual identity that doesn’t look like your business. You sign up, they ship you a site, and the site looks like their template, not your brand.

That’s a non-starter for an existing business. Your customers know what your site looks like. If we shipped you a different palette, different fonts, and different copy voice, you’d have to spend a week fixing it before you could put any traffic at it.

Brand-fork solves this by pulling your existing brand into AthenAI’s template engine, so the new pages feel like extensions of what you already have. Same fonts. Same colors. Same voice. Just on a faster, more automatable platform.

When extraction fails, that’s when our operator review queue kicks in — better to have a human spend 15 minutes getting it right than to ship you something off-brand.

/help/paths/ — the three paths and how they handle brand differently
/help/account/custom-domain/ — pointing your domain at the new branded site
/help/account/pricing-and-tiers/ — what brand-kit features unlock at each tier

[IMG-BRAND-KIT: laptop screenshot of the brand-kit Settings page showing palette, fonts, logo, voice. Product surface.]