description: "Capstone Project — Brand Kit — A single project that combines everything from Level 1: Creative Cloud Libraries (Modules 1 & 9), Illustrator vector work…"---

10 · Capstone Project — Brand Kit¶

A single project that combines everything from Level 1: Creative Cloud Libraries (Modules 1 & 9), Illustrator vector work (Modules 3 & 7), Photoshop compositing (Modules 2 & 6), and Premiere Pro editing (Modules 4 & 8). You'll build three connected deliverables — a logo, a poster, and a short promo video — that all share the same colors, logo, and typography through one Creative Cloud Library.

What you'll build¶

A logo designed in Illustrator, saved as a Graphic asset in your shared Library.
A poster / social graphic in Photoshop that reuses the exact same logo, colors, and character style.
A short (10-15 second) promo video in Premiere Pro that reuses the same logo and brand colors as an on-screen graphic.

Because all three pull from one Library, changing a brand color or the logo later would (in principle) update it in all three places — the point of this capstone is proving that pipeline works end to end, not just producing three unrelated files that happen to look similar.

Step 1 — Confirm your shared Library¶

Open Window > Libraries in Illustrator and select Mastery Path Brand Kit (created in Module 1, populated further in Module 9).
Confirm it has: at least two named color swatches (e.g. Brand Primary, Brand Accent), one saved character style, and at least one saved graphic. If anything is missing, add it now using the steps from Module 9 before continuing — everything downstream depends on this Library being populated first.

Step 2 — Design the logo in Illustrator¶

Open a new Illustrator document. Using Pathfinder operations (Module 7) and/or the Pen tool (Module 3), build a simple logo mark — an icon shape plus a short wordmark using your saved character style is enough; this doesn't need to be elaborate.
Apply your Library's Brand Primary and/or Brand Accent swatches as the fill color(s), rather than picking new colors freehand, so the logo and your palette stay linked.
Group the finished logo (Object > Group, ⌘/Ctrl+G), then drag it into the Libraries panel to save (or update) it as your shared Graphic asset — this is the version every other file will pull from.
Export a standalone copy too: File > Export > Export As, both a transparent PNG (for the poster) and an SVG (general web use).

Step 3 — Build the poster in Photoshop¶

Create a new Photoshop document sized for a poster or social post (e.g. 1080×1350 px for a social graphic, or a print-ready size like 8.5×11in at 300 PPI if you want to try the print path from Module 7).
Open Window > Libraries, select the same Mastery Path Brand Kit, and drag your logo Graphic asset directly onto the canvas — it lands as a linked Smart Object, not a flattened paste.
Add a background using a solid fill or an adjustment layer (Module 6) built from your Library's brand colors, and a headline text layer using your saved character style from the Libraries panel.
Use a layer mask (Module 6) if you're compositing the logo or headline over any photo/texture background, so the blend looks intentional rather than pasted on top.
Export the flattened poster as a PNG or JPG (Module 2's Export As workflow).

Gather 2-4 short video clips (stock footage, phone clips, or screen recordings all work) and import them (Module 4).
Build a 10-15 second sequence: a couple of quick cuts using the Razor tool, at least one Cross Dissolve transition (Module 8) between two of them, and basic Lumetri color correction on at least one clip.
Open Window > Essential Graphics, drag your Library's logo asset onto the timeline near the start or end as a title card, positioned and scaled over a couple of seconds — this is the same logo file used in Steps 2 and 3, not a re-exported copy.
Add a short text overlay using your brand's character style/colors if your Premiere version surfaces Library text styles in Essential Graphics; otherwise, manually match the same font, size, and hex color values from your Library swatches.
Level the audio (Essential Sound, Module 8) and export as an H.264 MP4 sized appropriately for where this promo would actually be posted (e.g. 1080×1920 for a vertical social promo, or 1920×1080 for a general web promo).

Step 5 — Review the whole kit together¶

Lay the three outputs side by side — the logo PNG/SVG, the poster export, and a frame grab or the first few seconds of the promo video. Check:

Does the same logo appear identically (same proportions, same colors) in all three?
Do the brand colors match across the poster background/accents and any on-screen graphic in the video?
Does the headline/title typography look consistent between the poster and the video's text overlay?

If any of these drift, that's the exact failure mode a shared Library is meant to prevent — trace it back to whether that asset was actually pulled from the Library versus recreated by hand in that app, and fix the source.

Cheat sheet — capstone touchpoints¶

Deliverable	App	Library assets reused
Logo	Illustrator	Colors (created here), saved as the Graphic asset
Poster	Photoshop	Logo Graphic (Smart Object), colors, character style
Promo video	Premiere Pro	Logo Graphic (title card), colors, character style (where supported)

How It Actually Works¶

Every deliverable resolves the same asset IDs, not copies of the same values. The logo, poster, and promo video don't happen to use matching colors because you typed the same hex code three times — each app reads the color swatch and Graphic by the Library's internal asset ID and resolves it to whatever data is currently attached to that ID. This is the structural reason the "make one deliberate change" step in the exercise is worth doing: it proves the three files are wired to a shared source of truth rather than three independent snapshots that merely started out looking the same.
Color drift between the poster and the video is usually a color-space mismatch, not a broken Library link. Photoshop's document, if left in RGB, and Premiere's Lumetri pipeline, which operates in its own working color space (typically Rec. 709 for SDR video), can render the same underlying RGB values as visibly different colors on screen if one environment applies a different gamma/transfer curve than the other. This is why "the colors match on paper" (identical hex values in both Libraries panels) can still look slightly different side by side — it's two different rendering pipelines interpreting the same numbers, not a sync failure.
A logo placed as a Smart Object in Photoshop versus a linked graphic in Premiere are resolved through two different rendering paths from the same source data. Photoshop's Smart Object resolves the Illustrator document through its own vector-rasterization engine at whatever size/resolution the Smart Object bounding box requires. Premiere's Essential Graphics engine resolves the same underlying asset through its Motion Graphics template renderer, which composites it directly into the video frame's color space and frame rate. Both start from the identical Library asset, but each app's own compositing engine is what actually produces the pixels you see — which is why a shape can look subtly different in weight or antialiasing between the poster and the video overlay even when nothing about the source Graphic changed.
Frame grabs and exported stills are a one-time rasterization, frozen at export time. Once you flatten the poster to a PNG or export a frame from the promo video, that specific file is permanently disconnected from the Library — it holds no asset ID, no version reference, nothing that would let it "catch" a later color change automatically. Only the source Photoshop/Premiere project files stay live-linked; every exported deliverable is a snapshot that has to be manually re-exported after a Library update if it needs to stay current, which is exactly the distinction the review step in Step 5 is testing you on.

Exercise¶

Complete all three deliverables — logo, poster, promo video — pulling every shared element (logo, colors, character style) from your Mastery Path Brand Kit Library rather than recreating them independently in each app. Then make one deliberate change to a color swatch in the Library (e.g. adjust Brand Accent's hex value slightly) and check, in each app, whether the placed instances offer a way to refresh/update to the new value versus needing to be manually replaced — this is worth understanding now, since it's exactly the workflow professional teams rely on to keep a brand consistent across dozens of files.

Completing this project means you're ready for Level 2 · Intermediate.