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Every brand has its own look
Colors and fonts weren’t enough: at thumbnail size, you recognize a silhouette. Eight looks, from Soft to Pop, now decide how your slides are drawn, without touching your brand.
Put three accounts run with joli.studio side by side, for three brands with nothing in common: a bakery, a boxing club, an invoicing app. Each has its own palette, its two fonts, its logo. And yet you recognized the tool before you recognized the brands.
The reason fit in a list. Everything that wasn’t a color or a font was shared by everyone: the eyebrow in spaced capitals, the round numbered badges, the pill button, the big quotation mark, titles at weight 600, text anchored at the bottom on the same margin, the gradient veil over photos, the “@handle · 2/6” footer. Even the brand’s corner radius only rounded the frame of an image.
A silhouette before a color
The test is simple: mix posts from several brands at thumbnail size, like in a feed, and try to tell who posted what. At that size, you don’t read a font or a shade. You read a silhouette: where the text sits, how heavy it is, which ornaments come with it.
That was the missing piece. The slide matrix says what a slide says — a title, a list, a key figure — and where its image goes; the brand provides the colors and fonts. It needed one more axis on top: how it’s drawn. That’s the look.
Eight looks
A look isn’t a list of settings. It’s a set of traits that belong together: margins, alignment, how titles are treated, ornaments, the shape of the image, the footer. You don’t pick a silhouette with twelve sliders; you recognize it at a glance.
Softdefault
Editorial
Poster
Minimal
Raw
Arch
Notebook
Pop
- Soft, the look we always had, stays the default: rounded corners, badges, pill button, text anchored at the bottom.
- Editorial reads like a magazine: thin rules, numbers 01 and 02, light titles, underlined link.
- Poster speaks up: huge capitals, text highlighted line by line on the photo, solid blocks.
- Minimal lets empty space do the work: small centered text, dashes, outlined button.
- Raw owns its technical side: thick frames, table rows, hard shadows, nothing rounded.
- Arch is soft and organic: arched or round images, everything centered.
- Notebook is handmade: lined paper, taped polaroid, hand-drawn strokes.
- Pop is playful: colored circles, stickers, starburst, speech bubble.
The difference shows best on a photo. Soft and Editorial lay a gradient veil, Minimal a flat one. Poster highlights its title, with no veil. Raw sets down a card with a thick border and a hard shadow, Arch raises an arch of the brand’s background over the photo, Notebook tapes a paper note onto it, Pop a card in its accent color.
What it touches, and what it doesn’t
The look changes neither your colors, nor your fonts, nor your words. It decides where each color goes, how titles are treated, what a list, a key figure, a quote or a button looks like, and what shape the image takes.
The brand provides the colors and fonts. The look decides everything else.
The shape of the image is more than decoration. An arch, a circle or a polaroid change the image’s area, and therefore the format requested from the model, its estimated cost and the cropping that the review flags. Everything comes from a single geometry, the same one that estimates how much room the text has. A polaroid generates the photo, not the print; a circle is generated square.
Two rules held from start to finish. Text never rotates: only images and ornaments tilt — the polaroid, the tape, the sticker, the starburst — so the estimated room stays right. And nothing export can’t render: hand-drawn strokes, the starburst and the bubble are vector drawings, the arch and the circle are rounded corners, the lined paper is a repeating gradient. No filters, no blend modes: what you see in the editor is what comes out of the export.
Choosing yours
On the Brand page, a “Slide look” block comes right after “Typography”: “The silhouette of your posts. Your colors and fonts stay yours.” Each look is shown on a specimen of your brand — a cover on your image style preview, then a list of your promises or products — never on a generic example.
You may not even have to look. The analysis of your website suggests one, marked “Suggested”, without ever overwriting a choice you made. The brand interview shows you two or three that fit you, right after the fonts, before asking.
Posts in progress follow along
The choice waits for “Save”, and that matters: every save redraws your posts in progress. Those that had the brand’s previous look take the new one, and a message counts them: “12 posts in progress redrawn.” A published post keeps its own. What’s already out doesn’t get redrawn.
Changing the look costs no Sparks: nothing is regenerated, neither text nor images. If an image ends up cropped too tightly in its new shape, the review flags it, as it would for any image.
In the editor, “Post style” also offers a “Look”. A post can take a different one from its brand: it then says so — “Brand: Notebook” —, keeps it when the brand changes, and “Reset to brand” gives it back. Like any change to a post, it can be undone.
All the way into animation
“Animation” posts read the same look: the typography, eyebrow, alignment and ornaments of every moment. Typing is set like one of the look’s quotes, the keyword is marked its own way — underlined in Editorial, with a slanted highlighter stroke in Notebook — and the dates on a timeline take the shape of its numbers. One exception: a moment keeps the animation’s background, so the photo carries on from one moment to the next. No card or arch over a moving image.
Eight, and no more
Every look is drawn in every cell of the matrix, on all four backgrounds and in all seven formats, then on the motion contents. That’s why the catalog is closed: a ninth look will have to pass the feed test against the other eight — be recognizable as a thumbnail — not just bring new ornaments.
The step by step is in the Guide: Choose your fonts, palette and slide look.
