How Playbook works

One set of fields, rendered three ways. Everything else follows from that.

The seven phases

  1. 00

    Contract & terms

    Contract and ground rules before anything starts: scope, approvers, rounds, timeline. Modelled on AIGA's Standard Form of Agreement. The overview renders these — it never asks for them twice.

  2. 01

    Discovery

    The client's own words, not the studio's conclusions. Send it as a link and they answer 21 questions at their own pace, with a summary at the end they can correct before handing over.

  3. 02

    Strategy

    The Brand Sprint plus the foundations a brand book opens with: belief, vision, mission, value proposition, messaging. This is what you present.

  4. 03

    Direction

    References with provenance. A Pinterest find carries the link back, so it never quietly becomes a page in a client's guidelines.

  5. 04

    Identity

    Colour, type, logotype. Change the symbol here and it follows to all 44 places in the book that show it — that coupling is the whole argument.

  6. 05

    Applications

    Where people actually meet the brand: web, packaging, signage, merch, print.

  7. 06

    Brand book

    128 pages rendered from the same fields. Not exported, not rebuilt — rendered. Which is why it cannot go out of date.

Four rules the system enforces

Nothing is guessed

A field nobody answered stays empty and says so. A number on screen is computed from the thing it describes, never hardcoded. An empty field you know about is worth more than a plausible one you don't.

Rights travel with the image

Anything fetched — a reference, a pin, a clip — arrives with rights marked unknown and cannot enter a brand book until someone takes a position. Saving someone else's work is normal; publishing it is not.

One value, one place

The overview, the book and the presentation read the same fields. There is no copy to keep in sync, so there is nothing to drift.

The model proposes, you decide

Suggestions appear as cards you apply one at a time. Nothing is written to the project until you say so.

Two surfaces for making things

The board

Every image in a project, filterable by the slot it belongs to. Choosing there writes the image into the brand book — everywhere it appears.

The canvas

A free surface. Nothing is coupled until you mark it, and the mark means three different things: keep as a candidate, add to the library, or put it into a named place in the book.

Guides

Brand strategy template

Purpose, audience, positioning, proof, personality and voice: what to write in each, with filled-in examples.

Brand guidelines template

Logo, colour, type, imagery, tone and applications, section by section, with filled-in examples.

Brand book examples

Complete brand books from example brands built on Playbook, to open and read page by page.

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