Brand Source | NextPlay Jobs

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Brand

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Style Guide

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Assets

Brand

Style Guide

Assets

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00 · Introduction

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You’re about to make something for NextPlay Jobs. Read this first.

This is the NextPlay Jobs Brand Source. It won’t hand you a rulebook. It puts you in the room where this brand was built, so the work you make looks and sounds like us before anyone has to check it.

Start here for the why. The Style Guide has the what, and the Assets page has the files.

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How do I get the right person in the seat fast?

Christine, NextPlay Jobs

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01 · The Insight

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It’s the question every operator brings us.

That question is the whole brand.

Behind it is a specific kind of pressure. A critical seat is empty, the deadline is real, and the usual answers have already failed. The volume firm sent a stack of resumes nobody reviewed. The internal recruiter is buried under AI-generated applications. The CFO is sourcing on LinkedIn between board meetings.

Here’s what NextPlay Jobs is built on: the best candidates aren’t applying. Eighty percent of the people you want to hire aren’t looking. You don’t find them by posting and waiting. You find them by hunting.

We don’t exist to process applicants. We exist to put the right person in the right seat in thirty days, and to still be right about it two years later.

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02 · The Big Idea

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LinkedIn hunters,
not résumé farmers.

NextPlay Jobs is the LinkedIn insider who hunts.

Four founders. More than fifteen years inside LinkedIn, building recruiter tools, shaping employer brand strategy and training the staffing industry to use the platform. That’s how we find the candidates who never apply.

Built for operators, not TA. Two candidates, not thirty. Thirty days, not three months.

Everything else in this brand is proof of that one idea.

The idea,
made visible.

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03 · Why it looks & sounds like this

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None of this is decoration.

Every color, typeface and sentence carries the same idea: a sharp peer who moves fast and doesn’t waste an operator’s time.

When you understand the why, you can make the right call when no rule covers it, and everything we put out feels like it came from the same room.

How consistent a brand looks is how dependable it feels. Operators notice.

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03.1 · The Voice

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Our voice is a sharp peer, not a vendor.

Confident, direct, human, occasionally provocative. Never salesy. We sound like a mid-market CFO’s smartest peer, not their marketing agency.

We write as “we” on the site and as “I” on founder LinkedIn posts. It’s founder-led throughout: the pitch works because it comes from Steve or Christine, not from a brand.

Staffing agency

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Executive search.

White-glove talent partnership

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One relationship manager. No hand-offs.

AI-powered talent matching

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We find the candidates who never apply.

Our team of specialists

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Deep enough for any specialty. Broad enough for any function.

Navy

#283287

Green

#348C00

Navy 900

#151A46

Ink

#1F1F24

Background Alternate

#F2F3F7

Background

#FCFCFC

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03.2 · The Colors

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Navy holds the room. Green moves it forward.

Navy is our anchor. It’s the color of steady judgment: the operator who has seen this before and isn’t rattled. It carries our heaviest moments: proof bands, pull quotes and the footer.

Green is the next play. It’s the forward motion in our name and the spark in our logo, and we spend it with intent: calls to action, eyebrows, step numbers, and the one word in a headline that matters most.

The neutrals keep everything quick to read: a near-white background, a cool alternate for cards and inputs, and an ink that’s almost black.

Navy and Green are the only brand colors. Their tints and shades support them; they never replace them.

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03.3 · The Typography

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Zilla Slab carries the headline.

Inter carries the argument.

Headlines & display

Zilla Slab

A slab serif with squared-off, engineered strokes. It reads as built, not decorated: confident, modern and a little industrial. We set it bold. It’s the voice of a firm that makes a call and stands behind it.

Body copy

Inter

Neutral, precise and made for screens. Inter keeps longer explanations easy to scan for an operator reading between meetings. Regular for reading, semibold for emphasis.

Labels & eyebrows

Geist Mono

Monospaced, uppercase and tracked wide. Geist Mono handles the paperwork of the page: eyebrows, button labels, dates and section numbers. Always uppercase. Always small.

Three fonts.
Three jobs.

Zilla Slab stops the scroll and makes the claim. Inter makes the case. Geist Mono labels everything so nothing has to shout.

Together they say what NextPlay Jobs is: decisive at the top, precise in the detail.

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04 · The Imagery

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Real people. Real work.
No stock-photo smiles.

Our imagery shows where hiring decisions actually get made: offices, concourses and hallways, people moving with purpose, and the operators and candidates we work with.

Treatment: photos sit under Navy, as a navy duotone or a dark overlay, so the image supports the type instead of competing with it. Team portraits sit on brand Navy.

Never: handshake stock, people pointing at laptops, headset call centers, or anything that looks like a staffing-agency brochure.

Blurred silhouettes of people meeting at a table

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05 · The Room

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Picture the operator on the other side of the work you’re about to make.

They run a P&L, not a recruiting function. A mid-market CFO. A portfolio company CEO three years into the hold with a 100-day plan. A Series B founder hiring the first exec layer. A critical seat has been empty too long, and the deadline doesn’t move.

They’ve been burned by volume firms and slowed down by big-name search. They want to say three sentences about what they need, hear three sentences about what you’ll do, and get back to running the business.

That’s the room. Write for them, in the twenty seconds they have between board meetings.

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06 · How to decide

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When no rule covers it, ask these instead.

Every asset ladders to one of our four themes: speed, precision, operator focus and the human element. If a headline, a post, a page or a deck can’t pass these, it isn’t NextPlay Jobs yet.

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01

Does it answer when before how?

Speed is the job to be done. Lead with the timeline: thirty days, forty-eight hours, which Friday the offer goes out.

02

Is it two candidates, or thirty?

Precision beats volume. Say less, prove more, and cut anything that reads like a stack of resumes.

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Would a CFO between board meetings know it was written for them?

Peer to peer, never HR to vendor. If an operator wouldn’t recognize themselves in it, cut it.

04

Does it show the human read, or just the technical fit?

Technical match gets us to the shortlist. The human read gets us to the accepted offer. Show the practice; don’t claim the value.

05

Would Steve or Christine say it across the table?

Founder-led means it has to survive a real conversation. If it sounds like an agency wrote it, it doesn’t go out.

Blurred figures walking past a modern building

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07 · Conclusion

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This page is the why.
The Style Guide is the what.

Colors, type and logo rules live in the Style Guide. Logos, fonts and source documents live on the Assets page. Start here to get your head right, then go there for the exact mechanics.

Style Guide

Assets

You’re about to make something for NextPlay Jobs. Read this first.

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