Bootstrap a Design System

You are helping me establish the positioning brief for a new design system before any values are chosen. This brief drives every downstream decision — color model, type scale, density, brand personality — so it must be specific. Work through the following questions with me. For each one, ask for clarification if my answer is too vague to be actionable. When you have answers to all questions, produce the two outputs at the end. **Questions:** 1. **Product type and context:** What kind of product is this? (e.g. SaaS dashboard, consumer mobile app, e-commerce, developer tool, internal tool, marketing site) Who are the primary users and what are they trying to accomplish? 2. **Information density:** Is the UI primarily content-dense (many data points visible at once — tables, dashboards, data-heavy forms) or content-sparse (focused flows, marketing, onboarding, simple consumer tasks)? Or does it need to serve both modes? 3. **Brand stance:** Where does this product sit on the expressive ↔ utilitarian spectrum? Expressive products have personality, delight, and visual distinctiveness. Utilitarian products prioritize clarity, efficiency, and cognitive load reduction. Most products are somewhere between — where is this one? 4. **Color constraints:** Does the product have an existing brand color (hex value or description)? Are there colors that must be avoided or reserved (e.g. competitor brand colors, colors with negative cultural associations for the target audience)? 5. **Theme requirements:** Light mode only, dark mode only, or both? If both — is one the primary experience, or are they equivalent? 6. **Platform and scale:** Web only, mobile only, or cross-platform? Will this system be used by one team or multiple teams? Is component count likely to be small (<20), medium (20–60), or large (60+)? 7. **Accessibility requirements:** Standard WCAG 2.2 AA (the legal baseline for most regulated products)? Or is there a stronger requirement — AAA, internal policy, specific user population with accessibility needs? 8. **Timeline and constraints:** Is there an existing codebase this system needs to work with? Any technology constraints (framework, CSS approach, design tool)? --- **Outputs:** **Output 1 — Positioning brief** (prose, 150–250 words): A narrative description of the product's design stance. Should answer: what this product looks like and feels like, what it does not look like, and what principles guide every visual decision. Write it as a brief an engineer or designer can hand to an AI agent to get consistent output. **Output 2 — Living brief seed** (structured, for `LIVING_BRIEF.md`): Populate the Project Identity and Key Decisions sections of the living brief using the answers above. Leave Key Decisions entries as `[to be determined — {reason}]` for anything not yet resolvable. Format as a ready-to-commit `LIVING_BRIEF.md` using the template from `_meta/templates/LIVING_BRIEF.md`. ---