Brazilian agency Asia needed to pitch itself to prospective clients and hires, the same way it pitches clients to the public. Instead of a PDF or a slide deck, the studio built a physical object: a red checkered case shaped like a book of matches, packed with a stack of individually designed cards. Each one takes on a different piece of the agency's identity, its manifesto, its values, its sense of humor, and the whole thing is small enough to leave on a nightstand.
Called the Bedside Brand Book, the project was made for Asia's own submissions circuit as much as for clients: it's credited to the agency alongside designers Vico Benevides and Manoel Michael, and was produced for Creative Recife, [Br]anderia and The Designers League. Every card carries the same red-and-white checkerboard border and the agency's rounded wordmark, but the content underneath swings wildly: bold declarations, retro-futuristic illustration, checklists, even a card shaped like a secret ingredient. The variety is the point. A brand book that reads the same on every page doesn't tell you much about the people who made it.
A deck of cards instead of a PDF
The case opens like a matchbox, sliding out to reveal the stack. Each card is a fixed size, the same red-and-white checkerboard border, the same rounded Asia wordmark stamped in a circle. That repetition does the job a cover usually does: it tells you these all belong to one object even when the content inside swings from typography-only statement to full illustration. Flip through and you're not reading a document, you're handling a set, the way you'd flip through a deck of playing cards or a stack of trading cards.
Bold type, checkerboards and retro-futurism
The palette runs orange, blue, pink, green and yellow, saturated and mixed in combinations that would clash in a normal system but work here because nothing is trying to be a normal system. The checkerboard pattern shows up on the case and recurs as a border motif across cards, giving the eye a repeated anchor no matter how loud the card underneath gets. Typography does most of the talking: oversized condensed letterforms, type set at an angle, words cut off by the edge of the card on purpose. Retro-futuristic touches, chrome-style gradients, sci-fi lettering, a glowing spotlight, sit next to hand-drawn illustration without feeling like two different studios made them.
Copy with an attitude: "Future driven since 2659"
Individual cards carry one-line declarations instead of paragraphs: "Future driven since 2659," "Skip ordinary," "Fast and curious," "Be wrong, but don't be boring." None of it reads like a mission statement lifted from a website's about page. The tone is closer to a zine or a fanzine insert than a corporate deck, which is exactly the register a self-promo piece needs if it wants to be read rather than filed away. A studio that wants to attract designers, not just clients, has to sound like somewhere people would actually want to work.
What a self-promo kit can borrow from this
The trick isn't the cards themselves, it's the shared grammar holding them together: one checkerboard border, one condensed display face, a five-color palette that repeats across every card. That's what lets the set read as one object even when each card riffs on something different. See more from the studio on its portfolio and Instagram.
