The honest answers.

Your brand rules — logo safe-zone and minimum size, the approved type scale, colour tokens, grid and clear-space — are built into a UXP panel inside InDesign/Illustrator. When someone nudges the logo off-brand or reaches for a non-palette colour, the panel flags it and can snap the element back to a compliant state. Designers keep their creative freedom; the brand-breaking moves are fenced off.

We scope the exact variant set that's in scope with you before the week starts. Because the variants are generated from one locked master rather than hand-built one at a time, clearing a large batch in five days is realistic. If your queue is bigger than a single week can hold, we'll tell you up front and size it as a Rescue Week plus an overflow batch — we don't make open-ended promises.

No. The panel runs inside the Adobe apps your team already uses, via Adobe's UXP plug-in framework — no separate tool to license or learn from scratch. The whole model is built for frozen-headcount teams: your existing people self-serve compliant variants, and the optional retainer absorbs overflow, so there's no req, no agency and no contractor to manage.

The Rescue Week is $4,500, with a 50% deposit ($2,250) to hold a slot and the balance invoiced on Friday handover. To keep the panel live for the team afterwards, seats are $90/seat/mo with a 5-seat minimum ($450/mo). If you'd rather we keep producing variants, the retainer is $2,500/mo, with $1,500 overflow batches for launch spikes. The panel and retainer are both optional.

A Rescue Week is hands-on and time-boxed — we're locking your brand and clearing a real backlog inside five working days. Capping at two engagements a month keeps each one properly staffed so "by Friday" actually means finished, not slipped into next week. It's a real constraint, not a fake-urgency tactic.

The panel is a tool your team uses to make their own on-brand variants quickly and safely — you keep producing in-house, just faster and without breaking the brand. The retainer is done-for-you: we keep producing the variants so your team doesn't have to touch them at all. Many teams use the panel for everyday work and the retainer (or overflow batches) for big launches.

You do. The variants are your assets, and the locked panel built during your week stays with you even if you never take a seat or retainer. Seats keep the panel updated and licensed for additional team members over time; they aren't a hostage fee for access to what you already paid for.

The 50% deposit reserves your slot and covers the pre-week scoping and rule-capture work. If we both agree before the week begins that it isn't the right fit, we refund the unused portion. Once the week is underway, the deposit is committed because the slot can't be re-sold. Full terms are confirmed in the engagement agreement before you pay.

Yes. The guardrail panel targets both, since brand teams live across InDesign (layouts, print, decks) and Illustrator (logos, marks, vector assets). During the Mon–Tue build we wire the panel into whichever apps your variant work actually happens in.

No. The triage tool and the homepage figures are illustrative arithmetic on inputs you choose — they show the manual workload BrandLock removes, not a guaranteed result for your specific team. Your outcomes depend on your backlog, your brand system and your channels. We'd rather under-promise and finish on Friday.