Two Ways of Being Open

The Swiss Federal Chancellery has prepared its official writing rules so that language models can apply them directly. The federal corporate design is public too. As a PDF.

Since 2024, Switzerland has had a law: software developed by the federal government must be disclosed. At github.com/swiss there are 55 repositories from the Federal Chancellery, from the design system to the API guidelines. One of them stands apart. In swiss-federal-writing-guidelines, the Chancellery's writing rules sit in a form that ChatGPT or Claude can work with directly: structured rules per national language, the official PDFs alongside as the source, and every correction referenced back to the paragraph number it came from.

The federal corporate design has existed since 2007. Logo, coat of arms, layout grids, all freely available. As a manual to download.

Same authority, two kinds of openness. The language rules are built for machines. The brand is for people to look things up in. Brands so far have only the PDF.

The Line Runs at Meaning

The objection comes immediately: brand books have long been public. True. Just not in a form a system can work with.

What brands disclose is the execution layer. IBM has developed its design system Carbon openly on GitHub since 2015, Porsche and Deutsche Bahn do the same. Since October 2025 there has even been a standard for how design tokens are exchanged between tools. Up to this point everything is open.

Then it stops. Deutsche Bahn puts its design system under a free licence and keeps the brand guidelines behind the login of its marketing portal. GitHub publishes its brand guidelines every year, as a PDF of nearly ninety pages. And the layer beneath, positioning, values, the logic behind the decisions, sits in no public repository at all. There is an entire industry whose product consists of putting brand guidelines into protected portals.

The closer you get to meaning, the more closed it becomes.

Why Nobody Minded Until Now

There was no reader for that layer. A few dozen people read a brand book each year, and a PDF is fine for them.

That has changed. Agents read specifications, not brochures. They filter, compare, and recommend based on what they can process. What exists only as layout barely exists for them.

The usual arguments against disclosure do not hold up. Competitors would know the positioning: they know it anyway, every campaign gives it away. You would lose control: that is long gone, every organisation has a file circulating called Brand_Guidelines_V3_FINAL_final.pdf. What is really behind it is less comfortable. A version history shows that a brand iterated, corrected itself, and got things wrong. Brands prefer to show that they always knew who they were.

Open Brand Repo

The brand specification as a public, versioned repository. Not all of it, and that is precisely the point.

What belongs in public is what is meant to be read: who the brand is, what it stands for, how it speaks, which facts apply, how it looks. That is what external agents need in order to select the brand at all. What stays internal is what an agent may promise in the brand's name, where the boundary runs, and where a human takes over. Publishing that means negotiating against yourself, as I described in Agent Authority.

The difference from the brand book is not accessibility. It is form. A repository has a history. Every rule sits there with a date, a reason, and the name of whoever decided it.

A commit is an accountable decision you cannot forget.

The tool therefore handles something that otherwise stays a matter of intention in brand work. In Taste & Accountability I described what remains of brand work once machines take over execution: the documented decision with a sender. A repository enforces exactly that, without anyone having to remember it.

The Objections

The most common one: disclosing your brand makes life easy for counterfeiters.

The opposite applies. Brands are already cloned pixel by pixel without anyone needing a specification. Estimates suggest around a million new phishing pages per month, three quarters of them with AI-generated content. The clone exists. What is missing is a way to recognise the original. A signed, public repository is exactly that: the reference against which what is genuine can be checked.

Two other risks are real. The first is neglect. Roughly sixteen percent of popular projects on GitHub are considered abandoned. Audi kept its UI repository public for years; sometime between November 2025 and May 2026 it disappeared. A dead repository is a worse signal than none at all.

The second is inconsistency. Everlane made radical transparency part of its brand and published the cost structure of every T-shirt. In 2020 the company laid off almost its entire customer service department, shortly after they moved to unionise. In May 2026 Everlane was acquired by Shein. Openness raises the drop. Whoever claims it and does not deliver falls further than someone who never promised anything.

Tony's Chocolonely shows how it can work. The company publishes every year how many cases of child labour it found in its own supply chain. The number is rising, from a few hundred to more than three thousand. That is not a failure. It is proof that someone is looking.

Where to Start

The brand book already exists. Running it as a repository is not a new project, it is a change of format.

The first step is the separation: what is meant to be read becomes public. What an agent may promise stays internal. The second is the form: every rule gets a date, a reason, and a sender, the way software has done it for decades. The third is the uncomfortable one: maintain it or leave it. A repository nobody has touched in two years says more about a brand than it would like.

The Federal Chancellery made its writing rules machine-readable because it wanted them applied. The thought is no bigger than that. A brand that wants systems to represent it correctly has to give them something to work with. In Brand Infrastructure I described why brands must become machine-readable. The Open Brand Repo is the form in which that happens.

And because this text is a recommendation too, what I called for in The Analysis Is No Longer the Product applies to it: it needs a signal at which it fails. If in two years no known brand runs its brand definition publicly and versioned, this was an idea without traction. That is my bet.

Terms used in this text: See the glossary →