Brand identity for a new era in sport.
PlayAI is a tech start-up creating and managing authentic digital representations of athletes as augmented avatars. Their proprietary technology captures appearance, voice, and mannerisms, translating into multiple languages to extend sportspeople’s global reach while reducing the need for constant media appearances.
The brief was to develop a bold new brand identity in just two weeks, ahead of PlayAI’s high-stakes pitch to athletes, unions, and investors — including an NBA Players Association meeting in Chicago with LeBron James and Steph Curry. The identity needed to position PlayAI as a credible technology leader and help define this emerging category.
We created a confident, dynamic identity that balanced innovation with a human edge. After exploring three design territories across colour, typography, graphics, and photography, we refined the preferred direction into a concise brand system.
The final identity reimagines PlayAI’s triangular play button as an adaptive algorithmic symbol of connected shapes. Bold purple, neon green highlights, and responsive gradients give the brand a tech-native, future-focused energy.
I led the exploration and development, shaping concepts into the final system and steering day-to-day creative direction, with oversight from Design Director Mikaelee Miller.
A digital home for the AI athlete.
The second phase of work with PlayAI was to extend their website beyond its initial investor focus and build out pages tailored to professional athletes, player managers, and C-suite club leaders. The brief was to create an informative, engaging platform that demonstrated the benefits of partnering with PlayAI, while illustrating how the self-serve product works. The site needed to balance clear messaging for athletes and clubs with key content for investors and marketing teams
Our approach centred on designing a simple, clean, and mobile-first experience with clear hierarchy, intuitive navigation, and strong calls to action — ensuring the site was as acquisition-focused as it was informative. The scope included four wireframed pages in Figma: Home, Self Service, About Us, and Log in/Sign up.
I led the website design, developing wireframes for each page and extending the brand guidelines I had created into digital modules and an illustration system. The main challenge was to communicate how the technology works while the product was still being built. To address this, I created a node-based illustration style that showed how different inputs — such as language and mood — could shape the final video output, giving users a clear, visual way to understand the product.
Credits
Brand Identity
Agency: Apparent
Design Director: Mikaelee Miller
Designer: Liam Burn
Copywriter: Jessie Staszkiewicz
Senior Account Director: Suzie Cotterill
Website Design
Agency: Apparent
Designer: Liam Burn
Producer: Ashton Bryce
Developer: Zan Savic
Copywriter: Jessie Staszkiewicz
Senior Account Director: Suzie Cotterill