patterson-brand

What this is

Patterson Companies brand identity, design tokens and editorial voice for Claude Code — including a drop-in Tailwind CSS v4 + shadcn/ui theme.

Text only. No images, no fonts, no PDFs, no .pptx. The whole plugin is well under 1 MB. Its predecessor was 96 MB because a design-system directory was copy-pasted into nine plugins and a single 5.6 MB PNG existed ten times over. Everything visual in this plugin is expressed as text, and every binary original is referenced by URL in the per-skill REFERENCES.md.

Skills

Skill	Use it for
brand-identity	Palette and each color’s role, logo usage and clear space, Proxima Nova typography, the mandatory sentence-case rule, what not to do. Includes a Google Stitch–format DESIGN.md.
design-tokens	The drop-in. theme.css (Tailwind v4 @theme + full shadcn semantic contract) and tokens.json (W3C Design Tokens format), plus install steps and a generator.
copy-style-guide	Editorial mechanics: sentence case, AP style and Patterson’s exceptions to it, numbers, dates, phone numbers, punctuation, product and business-unit naming, terminology.
voice-and-tone	Corporate voice (optimistic, clear, truthful, personable), the Patterson Dental addendum (empathetic, empowering, authoritative), and the social voice (first-person plural, 80/20). Kept explicitly separate.
presentation-templates	Building decks and Office documents on the Patterson standards — Arial substitution, chart colors, slide structure, image sizes.

Agent

brand-compliance-reviewer — reviews copy and UI against palette, typography, sentence case, logo usage and voice. Cites the specific rule and source for every finding, ranks by severity, and will not invent a rule.

Install

# inside Claude Code
/plugin marketplace add patterson-agents/patterson-corp
/plugin install patterson-brand@patterson-corp

Note

Nothing to build and no dependencies. scripts/build-theme.ts runs on Node 22.18+ via native TypeScript type stripping — no tsc, no bundler, no package.json, Node builtins only.

Using the theme

@import "tailwindcss";
@import "./patterson-theme.css";   /* copied from skills/design-tokens/assets/theme.css */

Order matters — Tailwind must load first. Full instructions, including Vite, Next.js and Astro setup, are in skills/design-tokens/references/installation.md.

Regenerate and drift-check:

node skills/design-tokens/scripts/build-theme.ts       # tokens.json -> theme.css
skills/design-tokens/scripts/verify-theme.sh           # exit 1 on drift; wire into CI

Important

theme.css is generated. Never hand-edit it — edit tokens.json and regenerate.

The palette

Primary and secondary, from the Brand Guide 2025 [BG25 p.24]:

Swatch	Name	Hex	Tier	Role
	Navy	#003767	Primary	Headlines, brand accents, dark grounds
	Sky	#00A8E1	Primary	Default CTA/button, accent
	Gray 80%	#58585B	Primary	Body copy, divider graphics
	White	#FFFFFF	Primary	Background for content-heavy applications
	Blue	#147EC2	Secondary	Supporting fills, secondary emphasis
	Light blue	#6DCFF6	Secondary	Light supporting fields, highlights
	Light gray	#ECECEC	Secondary	Accent gray on web and email
	Green	#7BC24D	Tertiary	Infographics and presentations
	Teal	#00817D	Tertiary	Infographics, and every eyebrow label
	Purple	#522E91	Tertiary	Infographics and presentations

Full tint ramp, digital palette, status colors and usage rules: skills/brand-identity/references/color-palette.md.

The Adobe Fonts situation

Proxima Nova is the Patterson brand font at every typographic tier [BG25 p.25]. It is a commercial typeface by Mark Simonson Studio, licensed to Patterson through Adobe Fonts (Typekit) kits uth1qfm (the Digital Pattern Library) and rul6mjk (pattersoncompanies.com). They are not interchangeable — use uth1qfm:

Kit	Faces	Weights served	Last published
uth1qfm — use this one	10	400, 500, 600, 700, 800 — each normal and italic	2019-03-05
rul6mjk — superseded, deficient	4	400, 700 — normal and italic only	2024-08-01

Caution

This plugin ships no font binaries and no @font-face rules, deliberately. Adobe Fonts’ standard terms serve fonts from Adobe’s CDN via a kit ID; they do not grant the right to extract, re-host, redistribute or bundle the binaries. A plugin or package containing them would be a redistribution.

The predecessor plugin (patterson-design-plugins) shipped three .woff2 files described in its own source as “licensed Adobe Fonts binaries, provided by the user.” An md5 check found proxima-nova-italic.woff2 (76bb0b958a918b4d270df75ecf0be2fe) to be byte-identical to the Adobe CDN payload for fvd=i4, which contradicts that description. Do not reproduce those files.

Do this instead: load https://use.typekit.net/uth1qfm.css and declare font-family: "proxima-nova", Arial, sans-serif — exactly what the Digital Pattern Library does. Arial is the sanctioned fallback [BG25 p.25] and is on every machine. Do not substitute a lookalike; an earlier extraction inserted Figtree, which appears in no Patterson source.

Weight coverage — resolved by kit choice

Note

Earlier versions of this plugin recorded the missing weights as a blocker requiring Adobe. That was wrong. The deficiency is rul6mjk’s alone: it declares exactly four faces (400 and 700, normal and italic) and serves no Semibold or Extrabold, so pages on that kit get browser-synthesised 600 and 800. uth1qfm declares ten faces and already serves Semibold 600 and Extrabold 800 — the two weights the Brand Guide names as its primary and secondary tiers. The fix is a kit swap, not an Adobe negotiation. Verified 2026-08-11 by fetching both stylesheets and counting their @font-face blocks.

Warning

Resolved pending account-owner sign-off. uth1qfm was last published 2019-03-05 — older than rul6mjk (2024-08-01) — yet carries more weights. That its weights are still being served is evidence the kit is live, not proof it is sanctioned. Patterson’s Adobe Fonts account owner must confirm uth1qfm is an active, correctly-licensed Patterson kit rather than a legacy one, and whether rul6mjk can be retired.

Open questions for Corporate Marketing and the Adobe Fonts account owner:

1. Confirm uth1qfm is an active, sanctioned Patterson kit — and whether rul6mjk can be retired.
2. Does Patterson’s Adobe Fonts plan permit self-hosting?
3. Is there a desktop Proxima Nova licence for InDesign/Illustrator work, and how many seats?
4. Is “Proxima Heavy” [BG25 p.60] a licensed weight or shorthand for Extrabold?

Two palettes, unreconciled

Warning

Patterson publishes two different blues for the same job and has never reconciled them.

Source	Sky blue	Link blue
Brand Guide 2025 [BG25 p.24, p.57] — authoritative, and the default here	#00A8E1	—
DesignSystem_042120 [DS20 p.7–8] — WCAG-adjusted, and what the live sites render	#269BCB	#147CBD

The 2025 guide does not acknowledge the digital palette. The 2020 deck calls itself “complimentary” and does not claim to override the guide. Measured: white on #00A8E1 is ~2.3:1 and fails WCAG AA at every text size; white on #269BCB is ~3.4:1 and passes AA for large text and UI components only.

theme.css ships the 2025 values as the default and provides an opt-in .patterson-a11y class that swaps in the digital set. This is the single most consequential open question in the extraction — escalate to corporatemarketing@pattersoncompanies.com.

Open [TBD] items

Important

Every one of these is something Patterson has never published, or a question only Corporate Marketing can answer. They are marked [TBD] in place throughout the skills. Do not fill them in.

Brand values that do not exist

1. Tint step percentages — the 75/50/25 ramp was recovered by sampling the printed swatches, not read.
2. A named spacing scale — the 5px grid is inferred from production CSS.
3. An elevation/shadow scale — none published. The theme deliberately ships none.
4. Motion/easing tokens — none published beyond one .3s ease-out button transition.
5. Status/semantic colors — none in the 2025 guide; the four in use are production values.
6. An on-dark error color — #D0021B is low contrast on navy.
7. A dark-mode surface ramp — Patterson publishes an on-navy accent system, not a dark theme.
8. A WCAG conformance target and version — the 2020 deck says WCAG 2.0; the 2025 guide says only “ADA standards”.

Typography

Which kit licenses Semibold (600) and Extrabold (800) was formerly listed here. It is resolved — uth1qfm serves both — subject to the account-owner sign-off noted in that section.

9. Whether the Patterson licence permits self-hosting.
10. Whether a desktop licence exists, and for how many seats.
11. Whether “Proxima Heavy” [BG25 p.60] is a real weight.

Documents and assets not recovered

12. The canonical SharePoint URL of the Brand Guide 2025 itself.
13. The PowerPoint best-practice bullets at [BG25 p.50], and the template’s own SharePoint path.
14. Slide dimensions / aspect-ratio standard, and the template’s named layouts.
15. Word, letterhead and report template specifications.
16. The 300+ icon library, and the missing logo colorways, business-unit families, AHI set and favicon — all on SharePoint.
17. Pixel-dimension labels in ImageSpecs_042120 — that PDF is image-only and they did not OCR.
18. The verbatim value-proposition text [BG25 p.8–9] — published in the guide, not reproduced here.
19. Voice addenda for Patterson Veterinary and Animal Health International — none exist.
20. Whether a DPL release newer than v5.7.2 exists.
21. Current owners of the digital design system — the named contacts are from April 2020.
22. Which AP Stylebook edition is current for Patterson (the Copy Style Guide cites 2022).
23. Refreshed social audience demographics — the published figures are from 09/2019.

Provenance

Every skill carries _SOURCES.md (which document, which page, what confidence) and REFERENCES.md (where the official original lives). Source keys used throughout:

Key	Document
[BG25 p.N]	Patterson Companies Brand Guide, VERSION 3.2025 — authoritative
[DS20 p.N]	DesignSystem_042120.pdf (April 2020 UX design system)
[IMG20 p.N]	ImageSpecs_042120.pdf (image-only, OCR’d)
[COPY22]	Patterson Companies Copy Style Guide 2022
[VOICE18]	Patterson Dental Marketing Voice Guidelines (9/25/18)
[SOC19]	Patterson Companies Social Media Writing Guidelines (09/2019)
[DPL]	Digital Pattern Library v5.7.2 production stylesheet
[PCOM]	pattersoncompanies.com theme stylesheet

Where sources conflict, the 2025 Brand Guide wins and the conflict is recorded rather than resolved silently — see skills/brand-identity/references/conflicts-and-gaps.md.

Important

Nothing in this plugin is invented. If a value is not in the sources it is written [TBD: not specified in <source>].

Contributing

• Never add a binary. No images, fonts, PDFs or Office files.
• Never invent a hex, font name or measurement.
• Edit tokens.json, then run build-theme.ts; commit both files. verify-theme.sh must pass.
• Skill directory name and the name: in its frontmatter must match exactly, with no namespace prefix — VS Code silently skips skills that violate this.
• kebab-case everywhere.
• Use ${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT} for intra-plugin paths. Never an absolute path.

Questions about the brand itself: corporatemarketing@pattersoncompanies.com.

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Source of truth: plugins/patterson-brand/README.md in the patterson-corp repository.