Stop Chasing Pretty. Build sticky.
Chrysalis Part 2: FREE style guide to take you from brand chaos to a brand identity that sticks
This post walks through how I rebuilt my entire personal brand using AI; including the style guide framework you can download free below.
Editorâs Note: This post is Part 2 of a short series on building a personal brand with AI. Not from a place of expertise or polish, but from the middle of the process. Itâs a reflection on feedback, identity, and the moment I realized the real work had very little to do with tools. (Part 1: When AI Told Me to Go Touch Grass)
It took a moment, if you will, to recover from reading that my original AI Flight Plan brand assessment resulted with a 5/5 for credibility but only a 2/5 for âemotionalâ and âunexpected.â What sent me into âfix this nowâ mode was the written commentary that left some serious internal scarring, âwhatâs holding you back is that everything looks like it belongs on a corporate blog.â
After all that work and months of writing, my discombobulated images that accompanied my articles created an unintentional brand. One that I did not purposely create, nor want to identify with now.
Thatâs okay, I thought as I quickly rallied, because in my head I can still hear the mantra from my days during corporate annual reviews, âfeedback is a giftâŚfeedback is a gift.â This certainly appeared to be a fixable problem, and it lit a fire that took me down a truly fun, creative, and quite informative path.
I write about AI adoption and how to build a proper foundation of systems before you purchase tools. I hadnât intended to chase the âimage creationâ tool rabbit down the hole, yet here we are.
Down the Rabbit Hole I Go
Once I had a vision of what my brand could be, nothing was going to stop me from figuring out how to make it happen.
In Part 1, I shared my branding experience through the analogy that I was âcaterpillar soupâ in the chrysalis stage of metamorphosis and I spent many hours during a four-day spiral completely obsessed with creating a âuniqueâ look. I tested over 15 tools and then ran into the ultimate surprise where my chatbot staged an interventionâŚon itâs own. This is the part of the story with the âhowâ I rebuilt my brand and its rise from the ashes.
All of this mayhem started from a branding quiz from AI Meets Girlboss, The Visual Brand Distinctiveness Test, that I casually took for fun.
The results I received from the quiz said that my brand looked âcorporateâ (gasp, faint), so I decided to burn it all down and rebuild. Who doesnât like a good phoenix story?
This is what my Substack webpage looked like when I took the test. My âbefore.â My first 20 post-series included movie references and clips, so I couldnât not have those. I was experimenting with branding elements around aviation, but for all of my follow on posts after those first 20 movie-related articles, I was trying to figure out how to use realistic photos within AI amongst a crisp white magazine-style background.
After reading the results from that test, along with her posts, it became clear that I needed a style sheet because the logo and color palette werenât enough. I needed to get clear on my audience, their pain points, my principles, my visuals and my voice. The style sheet needed to govern everything, not just the pretty parts.
It wasnât just the visuals that were different, although they had changed quite dramatically. I ended up revising and clarifying exactly what AI Flight Plan stands for, who it serves, what it refuses to do, and how it shows up to help.
Identity is the brand.
The brand style sheet I created governs every post, every image and every client conversation. Itâs the system underneath the aesthetics.
Itâs not a plan to deviate from. Itâs the principle to everything I create for AI Flight Plan. This isnât just about pretty pictures or pictures that âstop the scroll.â Iâm sharing because I think most people, including myself, skip this step. We pick colors and fonts, maybe hire someone to create a logo, and then we call it a brand. Thatâs not a brand, but just a mask. A brand is the answer to a much harder question.
What do you actually believe, and are you willing to let that belief cost you something?
Your brand isnât what you just say you believe. Itâs what youâre willing to lose by believing in it.
Brands are worthless with no boundaries if they say, âwe value integrityâ but the actual brand doesnât actually require the owner to say no to anything. What makes the branding principles real are that they define the constraints youâve chosen to live inside, and some of them will have a price. But thatâs what makes it real. A belief that costs nothing shows up as a preference with questionable principles behind it.
Creating a âstickyâ brand is more than just being recognized. It involves the trust part of really thinking about your message and getting crystal clear on the part of you that you want to share. That intentional connection point becomes your brand.
My Philosophy
The strongest foundations are built on belief. It took me a while to articulate mine. Then I got it. Instead of writing for everyone, write for the âone.â
Write for the one person whose pain point you are solving.
The AI industry has a chaos and disruption strategy where everyoneâs selling hype, panic and speed. (Does it make you wonder what is happening behind the scenes, away from the distractions and noise?) Theyâre making millions, or billions, off of vendors creating anxiety that youâre falling behind. Unfortunately, doom and gloom sells. Consultants want you to think this is so complex that you canât do it without them and the echo chamber is rewarding hot takes and fear-mongering. Yet, somewhere outside of the swirl, the majority of people in the world are still going about their lives. Somewhere, thereâs a nonprofit director with 15 people and no clear data strategy, trying to figure out how AI can actually help, and if it should help. But every piece of advice they find is either incomprehensible or trying to sell a solution for the wrong problem.
Thatâs my person. My âone.â Thatâs who AI Flight plan exists for.
Iâm intentionally not focusing on the âmove fast, break thingsâ startups or Fortune 500 companies with seven-figure AI budgets and dedicated ML teams. My target audience are the overwhelmed, the unsure and the afraid. The leaders who want to do AI right, not just fast, in order to triple their revenue in three years. They want to make their moonshots, and theyâre the organizations with the clarity that their people are their competitive advantage. And my audience is not willing to sacrifice their people for a productivity metric.
Strong foundation. Human at the Core.
Foundations over fads. Craft over Speed.
Tools donât build the cultures that scale your company. People do.
My target audience isnât just a role in an organization. Itâs represented by that âoneâ person I write for, as well as the people Iâm not writing for.
Who is your one person? Who are you not writing for?
Step 1 was just getting really clear about that.
The Visual Identity
Once I knew what I believed and who I was writing for, the visual question stopped being about what looked good and started being about what was true. This is where it got interesting and amongst some fire and ash, I produced something worth keeping.
Then thereâs my actual prompt that launched 1000 minutes of tool tunneling:
What are the different types of artistic styles I could use for my branding and consistent images? Something no on else is doing. Iâve seen a lot of cartoon, water color, oil paint, Pixar and graphic novel.
It was January 16, 2026. An new year and a new brand. I had become quite smitten with my fellow Substack writers and the brands they began creating through various AI art mediums. I decided to give it a try and quickly realized it felt like I was just copying everyone else.
What I already had when this project started was a logo, an initial color palette, an aviation theme and the random addition of my love of Victorian doors and architecture. Before I had done the work to discover my actual brand identity (which unfolded out of necessity), I experimented with different images or ideas just based on things I liked. I had seen Karen Spinnerâs doggo in one of her images and thought maybe thatâs what I should use.
That didnât seem sustainable. Then came winter break with the grandparents and some much needed downtime. As I was sharing my conundrum with my amazing mother-in-law, simply talking out loud about what I was trying to do, and immediately âthe problem I was trying to solveâ became clearer. I had showed her some of my favorite inspirations on Substack and asked her what resonated and what didnâtâŚjust to get some perspective.
Standing in her kitchen over coffee, I started breaking down what made the brands I admired so compelling, with their returning characters, seasonal variation, and the consistent palette across shifting moods.1 She asked a simple question that should have been obvious, âShouldnât your recurring character be a female pilot?â
Iâll be honest, I had many âWTHâ moments with my results for trying to use a female pilot as a repeating character (see Part 3 for blooper reel). I realized that I needed to also get clear on consistency while figuring out an art medium, since it felt like all of them had been created used already. Itâs hard to believe it was barely a month ago that I had prompted Claude Sonnet 4.5. This was its first response:
But I didnât want to be too precise or measured. So, I added Dallas Payneâs picture that inspired my quest for a better art medium that hadnât been used.
Claude came back, post deconstruction, with this (based on an original branding guide and colors that Iâd created for my website):
Well, we had more discussion about how it was not watercolor at all, but an early form of photography. Thatâs for a different post and time.
This was the beginning of an entire new obsession for me. Just like that. Because of AI Meets Girlbossâs branding quiz and Dallas Payneâs watercolor, I became a cyanotype devotee and Anna Atkins fangirl. So much so, that in a couple of months, I have an appointment at Londonâs Victoria & Albert museumâs private viewing room to see and hold original Anna Atkinâs cyanotype photographs. Iâm even taking the massive bound collection from Peter Walther that I just purchased to compare details. And if thatâs not enough obsessiveness, Iâm attending a class in London where I can actually learn to MAKE cyanotypes.
Thatâs what a real obsession looks like. And thatâs what it took to find a visual identity worth keeping.
What I Actually Built
Branding allows YOU to define the connection point that you make with others rather than leaving it to chance. Itâs intentional. AI should amplify your brand vision, not replace it with algorithmic and mathematical vector defaults.
Hereâs what came out of it.
This is the image I created to go with my post today. I always create the image from something that emerges as a theme from my writing that day. It took me 10 attempts to generate this. You should have seen the size of the other rabbit holes!
Itâs not just that every image costs tokens or credits, but I have learned that working with my art medium is also a great way to procrastinate from my writing. If I donât put an attempt limit on it, I will remain in that rabbit hole indefinitely.
Coming full circle, my resulting brand identity document is 23 pages. Instead of sharing all of it, I built a prompt guide for you to create your own branding style guide.
If you end up using it to build out your own brand, weâd all love to hear about it.
Quiz Time
I bet you didnât know thereâd be a test at the end! Thereâs only two questions and itâs pass/fail. Because, if youâve read this far, you too may want to develop your brand identity.
Without thinking more than three seconds, can you answer these two questions?
Who is your âoneâ person youâre writing for?
Who are you not writing for?
Bonus question: WHY?
Feel free to do it in silence, or what we all really want, share it with the rest of us in comments below!
If you canât answer, you might have some new things to think about.
Stay tuned for Part 3 where I share my tech stack, the two-layer prompt system that produces every cyanotype image, and some hilarious thumbnail art prompt fails.
Love this! And love the image style you've developed! AI Meets Girlboss's Distinctiveness Test was really helpful for my brand too! And I love Dallas' watercolour images too!
You reverse engineered my image?! Wow, that blows me away đŤ¨đ¤Š
What a very cool journey, Karen. I love how many of us got inspired, set out to create some cool images to throw up and suddenly we're super deep into a huge overhaul of our very existence on Substack.
Your new cyanotypes obsession sounds divine!! đŠˇ