Templates, brand kits and checks
What output templates, brand kits, social layouts and story checks each control, and why they are kept separate.
Four settings shape what Nuvelics writes and shows for your newsroom. They live under Settings, are managed by administrators, and answer four different questions. Keeping them apart means a change to one never forces you to copy another.
| Setting | The question it answers |
|---|---|
| Output templates | What should an output say, and how long should it be? |
| Brand kits | What should an output look like? |
| Social layouts | How are the cards of a social post arranged? |
| Story checks | What should Nuvelics flag in a story? |
Output templates
A template states how your newsroom wants one kind of piece written: its tone, house style notes and length. Templates exist for a Web Article, a Short-Form Video, and posts for X, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook and LinkedIn.
A template holds content rules and nothing else. It names no destination, credential or content management system. A "Breaking news" template therefore describes how a fast piece reads and serves every system you connect.
You can have as many templates of a type as you need, one per editorial pattern: a 90-second breaking piece and a features long-read are two templates of the same type. A template can be offered on all your newsdesks or just one, and can be set inactive, which takes it out of the output picker.
What a template holds depends on its type. An article has a minimum and maximum word count and a byline choice. A social post has a character limit and a hashtag limit. A video has a length in seconds. An X, Instagram or TikTok post's template also says what media the post carries.
Brand kits
A brand kit is how your newsroom looks: colours, typefaces, logo and motion. Where a template says what to write, a brand kit says what it looks like, and a connection says where it goes. A kit never names a template and a connection never names one either, so one template can render in several mastheads' colours, and a new masthead is a new kit and no new templates.
You can have several kits, which suits a group running several titles from one newsroom. A kit can belong to the whole organization or to one newsdesk, with at most one default in each of those scopes. An X, Instagram, TikTok or Short-Form Video template may name a kit; if it does not, Nuvelics uses the newsdesk's default kit, otherwise the organization's. A web article uses no kit, because prose has no visual identity of its own; its look belongs to the system that publishes it.
Social layouts
A social post can carry cards, and each card is drawn in a layout: a description of where words and shapes go and which brand-colour role each is drawn in. A layout contains no colour, typeface or logo. The brand kit supplies those, so one layout serves every masthead in its own identity.
Nuvelics provides a set of layouts shared by every organization, and your administrators can import their own. Each layout declares which card shapes it is offered in. The words in a card are written to roles such as headline, quote and bullet, each with a character limit, which is how an imported layout works with generation without being set up one by one.
Story checks
A story check is a rule you write in your own words, such as a house-style point, a tone requirement or an angle you want suggested. Nuvelics evaluates it against a story's text and reports what it finds, without leaving the story.
A check has a name, instructions of up to 4000 characters, an output of Findings or Suggestions, a Max severity of Inform or Flag, and the channels it runs on: stories delivered from your newsroom system and, where used, SOM. There is deliberately no severity that would stop a story: Nuvelics declares what it finds and a person decides what to do.
Two things bound the cost of checks:
- A check only runs on stories that arrive after it, and after checks were turned on for the connection. Turning one on never goes back over a backlog.
- At most ten checks can be enabled at a time. Checks are archived rather than deleted so a past result can still say which definition produced it.
Everyone can read check results, since a verdict is part of reading a story. Only owners and admins define checks, because turning one on spends model budget on every story that matches.