Contents
The brand's brain.
The all-in-one brand platform.

Introduction
What this brand is, and how to use this book.
What this is
One product for the whole chain: brief, strategy, identity, brand book, assets and the work that comes after. The book is a view, not a file. The asset is rendered, not uploaded. The client sees the same thing you do.
Vision
Every brand has one brain, and everything the brand makes comes out of it.
How to use this brandbook
This book is for anyone who writes, designs or builds for Playbook — including the agents. Open it before you make anything, and check the thing you made against it after. If the book and the product disagree, the product is wrong.
Brand foundation
The convictions everything downstream answers to.
The brand's brain.
- Purpose
- The brand in as few words as possible — what every decision is checked against.
- Usage
- Inside the company: briefs, reviews, onboarding. Not printed as a line.
Belief
Great work happens when the brand's thinking and its output live in the same place.
Mission
Build the platform where a brand is thought through, built, kept and produced — by studios, by companies, and by their agents.
Positioning & USP
For studios and brand-led companies, Playbook is the brand platform where the brand's thinking and everything it produces live in one place.
Brand promise
What you see in the book is what the product makes.
The brand book is rendered live from the fields.
Assets carry rights per image.
The sales site's demo runs the real extractor.
HUMAN runs its own clients on it.
The all-in-one brand platform.
- Purpose
- The promise, said in one breath to the outside world.
- Usage
- End of films and campaigns, packaging, the website hero, beside the logo in a lockup.
Category point of view
The category assumes a brand is a folder: guidelines in a PDF, assets in a drive, strategy in a deck nobody opens. Every tool then organises the folder better. Playbook assumes a brand is a set of decisions, and that every artefact should be rendered from those decisions. Change the colour once and the book, the portal and the asset kit change with it.
Frame of reference
Closer to a studio's own way of working than to a DAM. We refuse the file-storage category: nothing is stored twice, and nothing is a picture of the truth.
Differentiation
playbook.com stores; we create. Kive generates; we generate on a brand. Frontify manages; we build the brand first. None of them start before the assets exist.
Honest
Whole
Calm
Audience
The people the brand is built for. Every decision traces back here.
Core consumer group
Studio founders with three to ten brands who are done gluing tools together.
Target audience
Studios and brand-led companies that produce a lot and want it to hold.
Functional & emotional benefits
Functional: one place, one truth, assets that are always current, a client who finds the file alone. Emotional: the calm of knowing the brand holds — and the pride of showing it.
Brand strategy
How the brand is organised, and the rules the product obeys.
Brand architecture
Playbook is the product. HUMAN is the studio that builds it and uses it. Brands inside Playbook are the clients' — never sub-brands of ours.
Product philosophy
Render, never build. One value in one place. Unknown must be sayable. A number on screen is computed from what it describes. Nothing ships that the book would not approve.
Naming & nomenclature
Playbook is the product, always capitalised, never 'the Playbook'. A brand inside it is a brand, never a project or a client. A workspace is where a studio or a company works. A board is a collection in the library. Phases are numbered 0–6 and named: Framework, Discovery, Strategy, Direction, Identity, Applications, Brand book.
20-year roadmap
5 years: the standard tool for studios in the Nordics. 10: the place brands are built, for companies and their agents. 15: the brand layer that other tools connect to. 20: still one brain per brand.
Communication platform
What the brand says, and how the same message survives every format.
Think the brand through once, and every asset comes out of that thinking.
- Purpose
- The one thing every message has to leave behind.
- Usage
- The website's opening line, pitch decks, press releases, the first sentence of sales copy.
One brain: strategy to asset, in one place.
Honest rendering: nothing stored twice, nothing decorative.
Built for studios: portal, quotes, retainers.
Agents welcome: readable by machines.
Product messaging framework
Claim: your brand book is a view, not a file. Mechanism: every page renders from the brand's fields. Benefit: change once, it changes everywhere. Proof: the book on this site is rendered live.
Language system
We say: brand, book, asset, workspace, request. We avoid: DAM, content hub, synergy, AI-powered. Technical terms get a plain sentence next to them the first time.
Message translation
Web: 'The brand's brain lives here.' Social: 'Paste your site. See your brand.' Studio pitch: 'Your client finds the logo at seven in the evening without emailing you.' Portal: 'Everything about your brand, in one place.'
Brand manifesto
A brand is not a folder. It is a set of decisions — who you are for, what you refuse, what you promise — and everything you make should be rendered from those decisions. The book, the portal, the campaign image: views of the same brain. We built Playbook because the tools we had stored the pictures and lost the thinking. Here the thinking comes first, and the pictures come out of it.
Tone & impact
How the brand sounds — and what that makes possible.
Tone of voice
A senior colleague: plain, specific, calm. Short sentences. Verbs. Say what a thing is, then what it does. Never 'AI-powered', never 'seamless', never an exclamation mark. When something is unknown, say so — an honest empty field beats a confident guess.
Tone principles
Plain before clever. Specific before general. Calm before loud. Say what a thing is, then what it does. If something is unknown, say so. If a number is on screen, it was computed from what it describes.
Tone spectrum
Serious 70 / playful 30 — one bright note per page, never a joke per sentence. Authority 60 / friend 40 — a senior colleague, not a lecturer. Formal 40 / casual 60 — full sentences, contractions allowed, no slang.
The all-in-one brand platform.
The brand's brain lives here.
Paste your site. See your brand.
Your client finds the logo at seven in the evening.
Change it once. It changes everywhere.
Render, never build.
What this enables
A studio runs ten brands without gluing five tools together. A company keeps one brand consistent across every hand that touches it. A client sees where the project stands and takes the file without asking. An agent reads the brand and produces on-brand work without a human copying rules into a prompt.
Brand narrative
Every brand has a moment where the strategy deck, the identity files and the campaign images stop agreeing. Someone updates a colour in one place and not the others; someone emails for the logo; someone generates an image that has nothing to do with the brand. Playbook is the place where that stops being possible, because there is only one place. Built by a studio that had that problem every week — and used its own product to fix it.
Strategic do's and don'ts
Do: render from the brand's fields. Do: show the real product. Do: say 'unknown' when it is. Do: keep client colours in the content, never in the shell. Don't: store the same fact twice. Don't: use stock imagery or 3D blobs. Don't: promise what the code does not do. Don't: write 'AI-powered'.
Logotype
The mark, the room it needs, and how it must never be used.
- Never rotated, never outlined, never with a drop shadow.
The height of the “P” on every side. No other element may enter the dashed area — not type, not an image edge, not a partner mark.
The dashed line is the margin from the layout system. The mark never crosses it, and never sits closer to another element than its own clear space.
The divider is one grid unit; the partner mark is scaled to match the optical height of ours, never the literal height. Neither mark may sit inside the other's clear space. Where a partner's own guidelines conflict with these, theirs govern their mark and ours governs ours.
Colour
Roles before values. Every combination is contrast-checked.
Derived from the core colours — never hand-picked.
Every ratio below is computed, not claimed.
- Paper on Near-black 17.7:1
- Near-black on Paper 17.7:1
- Lime on Near-black 16.7:1
- Near-black on Lime 16.7:1
- Paper on Coal 15.5:1
- Coal on Paper 15.5:1
- Lime on Coal 14.6:1
- Coal on Lime 14.6:1
- Paper on Grey 4.8:1
- Grey on Paper 4.8:1
- Lime on Grey 4.5:1
- Grey on Lime 4.5:1
- Near-black on Grey 3.7:1
- Grey on Near-black 3.7:1
- Coal on Grey 3.2:1
- Grey on Coal 3.2:1
- Near-black on Coal 1.1:1
- Coal on Near-black 1.1:1
- Lime on Paper 1.1:1
- Paper on Lime 1.1:1
- Motion. With reduced motion switched on, nothing moves: no slides, no 18 px entrances. Fades up to 150 ms stay, everything else is still.
- Text size. Body text no smaller than 16 px on screen and 9 pt in print. Captions 13 px at the least.
- Images. Every image that carries meaning has alt text that says what it shows and why it is there. Decorative images have empty alt text.
- Colour alone. Colour never carries meaning on its own — a status, an error, a link also has a word, an icon or an underline.
Surface carries the page, ink carries the words, and the accent is spent once. A layout where the accent competes with the surface is the most common way this system goes wrong.
- Lime never carries text on paper — contrast fails.
- Client brands' colours live in the content, never in the shell.
Typography
A display face for presence, a text face for reading.
| Style | Size | Line height | Tracking | Sample |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Display | 76 px | 0.95 | -0.03em | Playbook |
| H1 | 54 px | 1.0 | -0.02em | Playbook |
| H2 | 38 px | 1.1 | -0.02em | Playbook |
| H3 | 27 px | 1.2 | -0.01em | Playbook |
| Body | 17 px | 1.6 | 0 | Playbook |
| Caption | 13 px | 1.5 | 0.02em | Playbook |
The same page, set to the scale in this book
Display carries the argument; the text face carries the evidence. Nothing in a layout should need a third size that is not on the scale — if it does, the hierarchy is the problem, not the type.
Iconography
Stroke weight, corner treatment, and the grid icons are drawn on.
Principles
Line icons, 1.5 px stroke, rounded caps, on a 20 px grid. Monochrome, inheriting text colour.
- The ✳ is a mark, not an icon — never in the icon set.
Icons are drawn on a 24 px artboard with a 2 px keyline, on the same 8 px base unit as every other measurement in the system. Square shapes fill the keyline; circular shapes overshoot it slightly so the two read at the same optical size.
Art direction
How imagery is chosen, treated and cropped.
Principles
Real product and real brands. Generated imagery is always from a brand's own palette and labelled as generated. No stock. No 3D blobs. No purple gradients.
- Screenshots are the product, never mock-ups.










Material language
How the brand speaks about what it is made of — without overclaiming.
Philosophy
Playbook is software. We do not talk about materials — we talk about what is rendered from what. The only claim we make about our own making is that nothing on screen is decoration.
Grid & spacing
The layout system every surface inherits.
System
A 12-column grid with 1.5 rem gutters. Content grids are three columns on desktop, two on tablet, one on a phone. Sections breathe with clamp(4rem, 5vw, 10rem). Cards have 12–22 px radii; the bigger the surface, the bigger the radius.
| Token | Value |
|---|---|
| Corner radius | 12px |
| Base unit | 8px |
| Columns | 12 |
| Margin | 64px |
| Max width | 1280px |
Editorial & templates
The layouts other people will fill in without us.
Template system
Two templates: the presentation (16:9, near-black cover with the ✳, paper content pages) and the document (A4, paper, Inter, one accent line in lime). Both render from the brand's fields; nothing is pasted in.
Editorial rules
One idea per page. Headlines set in Inter Semibold, balanced. Body at 65 characters. Numbers in tables, never in prose. Uppercase labels with tracking for eyebrows.
Data visualisation
Numbers as part of the system, not an afterthought.
Chart principles
Charts are part of the design system: an area fill, a faint grid, an emphasised endpoint. Every number on a chart is computed from the data it describes. No decorative charts.
Categorical & sequential colour
Categorical: lime, paper, coal, grey — four steps, then hatching. Sequential: lime to near-black. Semantic good/warning/critical are separate from the accent and never lime.
Motion
How the brand moves — easing, tempo, and what motion is for.
Principles
150–300 ms, ease-out. Reveals on load, not on scroll. Hover states move 2 px at most. Reduced motion is respected everywhere.
- Motion clarifies, never decorates.
Transform and opacity only. Every motion has a still equivalent: with reduced motion switched on, nothing on this page moves.
Brand in use
The identity where people actually meet it.
The all-in-one brand platform.
See the rangeNear-black ground, paper text, lime for one action per screen. Hero with the live extractor. Sections breathe; grids are three columns. Motion reveals on load, not on scroll. Every case card is rendered from a real brand.
Digital
The product itself: studio, client portal, public brand book. Sales site on playbookbrand.com. Email: plain text, one message, no drip. Social profiles: the ✳ on lime as avatar, the wordmark on near-black as banner.
One image, one sentence. Rhythm: brand image, product screenshot, brand image. Type only in Inter, only in paper or near-black. Lime as ground for statements, never as text on paper. Formats: 1:1 and 4:5; stories reuse the 4:5 crop.
The all-in-one brand platform.
Out of home · 3×6 mHero image generated from a real brand's palette, one line, one action: 'Paste your site.' No feature lists in campaigns; the product demo is the campaign.
Rarely. A business card: near-black, ✳ in lime, name and email in Inter. A printed brand book is a mockup of the product, not a deliverable — the book lives on the web.
Environmental & signage
Studio walls and events only. A single lime panel with the ✳, or the wordmark on near-black. No wayfinding system — we are not a venue.
Merchandise
What the brand puts its name on when it does not have to.
The ✳ on a tote or a cap, in lime on near-black or near-black on paper. Never the wordmark on merch — the mark is enough. Never on white.