Playbook by Stu Taylor

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CLIENT

A sports team man­ag­ing app that links direct­ly to its users’ Face­book account. Cur­rent­ly it’s a small ded­i­cat­ed team that is pas­sion­ate about cre­at­ing an app that blows away the com­pe­ti­tion and pro­vides a rich fun expe­ri­ence for their users.

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BRIEF

Play­book had the begin­nings of an iden­ti­ty, but they knew it was­n’t rep­re­sent­ing them the way they need­ed. So, we blew it up and start­ed over, includ­ing renam­ing the com­pa­ny. They kept empha­siz­ing the social aspect of their app since it was the only one on the mar­ket that con­nect­ed direct­ly through Face­book. Ulti­mate­ly, that is what set them apart from their com­peti­tors. One major road­block we kept run­ning into was how to rep­re­sent a fun expe­ri­ence as well as sports with­out being too sport spe­cif­ic. Although many of the ini­tial logos were well received, Play­book was still wor­ried users would think their sport was­n’t an option in the app.

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APPROACH

The num­ber one thing that influ­enced me was the per­son­al­i­ties of the Play­book crew. They’re fun, friend­ly guys who enjoy win­ning their club soc­cer game as much as grab­bing beers after­wards. I want­ed that per­son­al­i­ty reflect­ed in the iden­ti­ty. Our final land­ing spot takes sports’ ubiq­ui­tous sym­bol­ism of dia­gram­ming plays and mix­es it with an image every­one can relate to: a smi­ley face. The big win of the mark was avoid­ing high­light­ing or exclud­ing any one sport. Also, renam­ing the app Play­book helped rein­force its ties to Facebook.

The design concept for Playbook as an app for amateur sports was to make the tone friendly, the branding and user interface clean, and convey the simplicity of the app. The design flowed through a few iterations that helped us discover the true identity of the project while the complexity was stripped out of the design to focus on the initial guiding principles. The design process helped us think about the user through every step and we came to a brand that clearly defines our purpose and tells a story to the user about what they can expect from our app. — Robert O’Neill and John Eastman, founders of Playbook