Brivd

Strategy is where a brand is won or lost — and it's the first thing that gets skipped when a deadline looms. Brivd exists so it doesn't. It's a structured way to do the thinking before the design: a repeatable process that pulls the strategy out and captures the right information up front, so the work starts from clarity instead of guesswork.

The method draws on Michael Johnson's Branding in Five and a Half Steps and the same investigation-and-strategy work behind projects like Sxaler and LoyaltyLion — turned into something I can run every single time, instead of holding it all in my head.

Brivd runs the brief as a guided process — two ways, depending on what you need. The full brief walks the whole method for building a brand from the ground up; the short brief is a fast lane for a single design job. A brand brief sets the strategic foundation, and every project brief inherits from it — so nothing drifts from the strategy underneath.

It moves through five steps, then exports a clean, editorial brief a designer can open and start from:

• Investigate — get clear on what the brand actually is
• Strategy — five sentences, five deliberate choices
• Narrative — turn the strategy into a working story the brief can carry
• Design direction — where the brand sits, and what design must do and avoid
• Implementation — where the work shows up, and the one rule that protects it

I built Brivd in Lovable — no traditional dev cycle, just prompting my way to it. Honestly, it felt less like coding and more like having a conversation with the build.

The harder part was the thinking: taking a briefing method — shaped by Branding in Five and a Half Steps and my own client process — and tightening it into a flow that's faster to follow than to remember. That's the whole point of it. I built Brivd so the process doesn't live in my head anymore — it lives in something I can hand to anyone.