California Forever Brand Guide

Digital brand guide site for California Forever — the first client implementation of G&M's brand-guide product. Next.js app covering colors, typography, logo, voice, photography, and applications.

Client Contacts

• Anders Engnell — Chief of Staff (primary day-to-day contact)
• Jan Sramek — CEO (direction / approvals)

Same contacts as the main California Forever project — see ../CLAUDE.md.

Site Reference

Project Info

• Harvest project: Retainer #3 2026 (id 48006319, client: California Forever, Inc.) — current active retainer; no dedicated brand-guide project exists in Harvest, so time logs against the retainer.
• Job Number: Rolled into CF retainer — TBD if a separate job number is ever assigned
• Quote: Not separately quoted — retainer hours
• Phase: Active — initial build deployed

Project Status

2026-04-21 — Content refactored into JSON, /api/brand endpoints live, consumed by Slack MCP

All narrative guide content (brand-foundation, voice, messaging, photography, applications) pulled out of React pages into structured JSON under content/*.json. Added /api/brand index + /api/brand/[category] endpoints exposing all 9 categories with CORS + 60s SWR caching. Pages re-render identically from JSON; visual parity verified in Chrome.

These endpoints are now consumed in production by the Slack-native brand guide assistant at https://brand-guide-mcp.vercel.app. When someone types /brand colors in G&M's Slack, it fetches this site's /api/brand/colors and renders the palette with native rich_text color swatches.

Sibling project: ../../brand-guide-mcp/ — see that README for the bot side.

2026-04-21 — Initial deploy + password gate removed

Started the day with a fresh Next.js project already wired up (landing page, password gate, brand-foundation / color / typography / logo / iconography / voice-and-tone / photography / messaging / applications / assets routes). Deployed to Vercel for the first time:

• GitHub repo: ericdowns/cf-brand-guide (already existed and pushed)
• Vercel project: california-forever-brand-guide (linked but had zero deployments)
• Disabled SSO protection (all_except_custom_domains → off) so the site is publicly reachable
• Triggered the first production deploy via vercel deploy --prod
• Updated Projects Dashboard entry so the URL matches reality (was cf-brand-guide.vercel.app, now california-forever-brand-guide.vercel.app)

Then removed the in-app password gate entirely — stripped the sessionStorage auth from app/page.tsx and the auth guard useEffect from app/(guide)/layout.tsx. Pushed to main, Vercel auto-deployed, site is now fully public.

Closed out the session by setting up project notes (this file) and adding a CLAUDE.md at the project root with stack, routes, tokens, and gotchas — so future sessions pick up cold. Also removed a dead proxy.ts file left over from an earlier auth approach (Next.js middleware must be named middleware.ts, so it was never invoked).

Status: Live and public at california-forever-brand-guide.vercel.app. No auth. No custom domain. Project notes + CLAUDE.md in place.

Related

Docs

Open Items

• Assign client contacts
• Decide on custom domain (if any)
• Confirm scope vs PRD — which sections in app/(guide)/ are in-scope for v1 vs later