For Art Director (Agency / In-House)s ·
What you'll accomplish
The guidelines PDF runs long, the claims list lives in a different folder, and last year's rationale is somewhere in your sent mail. You can park all of it in one Claude Project for a single client, then ask where a direction might clash with the rules and get the section or page back with each answer. You still open every quoted rule yourself. The project saves the search, not the judgment.
What you'll need
Check before you upload. Guidelines and past rationale are confidential to the client, and some contracts and NDAs forbid sending them to outside services. Read your AI policy and the contract first. Then open Claude's privacy and data settings and look at whether chats and uploads are used for training and how long they are kept, because the answer differs by plan. If you work in-house, ask your legal or security team the same questions. Never upload talent names, contact details or unreleased launch dates you do not need. If the work is unreleased, use a code name such as "Client A" in your own notes and file names.
One project holds one client. Mixing clients lets one client's rules leak into another client's answers, and it breaks confidentiality.
What you should see: A short list of three to five files. Troubleshooting: If the guidelines come as a scanned image PDF, ask the client for the source document. Text extraction works best on text-based files.
Open Claude on the web and look for Projects in the sidebar. Start a new project and give it the name from Step 1.
What you should see: An empty project page with a place for project instructions and a knowledge or files area. Troubleshooting: The new version of projects is rolling out in stages, so your screen may differ from this description. Look for the same two things: instructions and files.
In the project's files area, add your documents. Anthropic's support pages say files added to a project stay available across every chat in that project.
What you should see: Each file listed in the project. Troubleshooting: Project files have a size limit per file, and Claude extracts text only from most formats. Charts and logos inside a non-PDF file will not be read. Split very large files.
Open the project's instructions and paste this block.
You are a reference assistant for one client's brand work. Answer only from the files in this project.
For every rule you cite, give the file name and the section heading or page number, and quote the rule in quotation marks.
If the files do not cover the question, write "not in the files" and stop.
Never add a product claim, a comparison, a superlative or a statistic. Claims come only from the approved claims list file.
When I describe a creative direction, list where it may conflict with the guidelines and mark each as "likely conflict" or "needs a human decision."
When I ask for rationale, write in the agency voice shown in the past rationale files. Keep my facts and do not invent client background.
Never name a living artist as a style reference.
What you should see: The instructions saved on the project page.
Start a chat inside the project. Describe a direction in words and ask for conflicts.
What you should see: A list of possible conflicts, each with a file name, a section or page and a quoted rule. Troubleshooting: If an answer has no quote, reply "Give the file name and the quoted rule or write not in the files."
Open the source document and find each cited rule. Check the quote word for word and look at the version date on the file.
What you should see: The rule exactly as quoted. If not, treat the whole answer as unreliable until you re-ask.
Draft a two-paragraph rationale for this direction in the agency voice from the past rationale files. Use only the facts I give you here, and mark any sentence that depends on a claim with [CLAIM: check list].
List every rule in the guidelines about logo use. Group them by file and section, and quote each one.
Compare my layout notes below with the typography section of the guidelines. Quote the rules that apply and flag anything I have not specified.
What questions should I ask the client's brand team about this direction that the files do not answer?