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

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

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.
Every brand has one brain, and everything the brand makes comes out of it.
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.
The brand's brain.
Great work happens when the brand's thinking and its output live in the same place.
Build the platform where a brand is thought through, built, kept and produced — by studios, by companies, and by their agents.
For studios and brand-led companies, Playbook is the brand platform where the brand's thinking and everything it produces live in one place.
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.
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.
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.
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
Studio founders with three to ten brands who are done gluing tools together.
Studios and brand-led companies that produce a lot and want it to hold.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Think the brand through once, and every asset comes out of that thinking.
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.
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.
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.
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.'
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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'.
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.
Derived from the core colours — never hand-picked.
Every ratio below is computed, not claimed.
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.
| 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 |
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.
Line icons, 1.5 px stroke, rounded caps, on a 20 px grid. Monochrome, inheriting text colour.
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.
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.










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.
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 |
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.
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.
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: 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.
150–300 ms, ease-out. Reveals on load, not on scroll. Hover states move 2 px at most. Reduced motion is respected everywhere.
Transform and opacity only. Every motion has a still equivalent: with reduced motion switched on, nothing on this page moves.
Near-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.
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.
Hero 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.
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.
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.