Printable product identities — Little Sleeper + The Comeback Plan

Little Sleeper Planner (by Hale & Harper): a printable planner for parents of children 0–3, sold as an instant download and as a gift. It organizes; it does not diagnose or promise sleep. The look had to feel warm and trustworthy, not babyish, and print with almost no ink. The Comeback Plan: a printable 4-week restart plan, sibling of The Gym Anxiety Field Manual. It had to read as part of the same series without copying it, and avoid any body or before/after imagery.

Turn 1: print first, screen second. For both products I set the print rules before the palette: white pages, thin 0.5–1 pt lines, no dark fills, everything readable in grayscale, plus a low-ink version of every log page. Color became an accent, not a surface.

Turn 2: Little Sleeper — four directions.

• Linen & Moon (Midnight Ink, Sage, Clay; Fraunces + Nunito Sans). Strength: calm without being gendered, and a deep navy lockup stands out in a category full of pink and beige boho.
• Meadow Heritage (Forest, Butter, Terracotta; Libre Baskerville + Source Sans 3). Strength: a more seasonal, cottage feel. Trade-off: less distinct in a beige-heavy category.
• Dusk Lullaby (Plum, Lavender, Peach; Lora + Mulish). Trade-off: softer, but plum costs more ink on every page.
• Nursery Modern (Charcoal, Mustard, Teal; Young Serif + Figtree). Trade-off: fits a younger design-led buyer, but pulls away from the heritage tone of the parent brand.

Turn 3: a mark with no baby in it. The "moon cradle" icon is a single rounded stroke: a crescent holding a small four-point star. No faces, cribs or babies, so it still works at age 3 and as a gift. The endorsement "by Hale & Harper" always sits with the product name and is never larger than it.

Turn 4: The Comeback Plan — family over novelty. I explored four directions (Trailhead, Logbook, Daybreak, Steady). Trailhead keeps the stamp-and-seal language of the Gym manual but gets its own color key (pine + trail orange) and its own symbol: a trail line that loops back on itself and ends in an arrow. "You came back, keep going." The trade-off with the other three: more freedom from the series, but a higher risk of breaking it or drifting toward a generic habit-app look.

Little Sleeper (shown in the Linen & Moon direction)

• Palette: Midnight Ink #2F3B56 · Warm Stone #6E665E · Sage #8DA390 · Clay #C2876A · Mist Blue #B7C7D6 · Oat #F3EDE3 (mockups only)
• Type: Fraunces 500/600 titles; Nunito Sans 400–700 body and tracked small caps; no weights under 400 ("readable at 3 am")
• Rules: log rows at least 8 mm tall; tints max ~15% of a page; color is never the only signal
• Voice: a friend who is good at lists. Banned: "cure", "fix", "guaranteed", "sleep through the night", "hack"

The Comeback Plan (shown in the Trailhead direction)

• Palette: Pine #1F3A33 · Trail Orange #C8582A · Kraft #F2EADB · Field Ink #1B1D1B · Sage #7E9679 · Stone #D8CFBE
• Type: Archivo 700/800 title, IBM Plex Sans body, IBM Plex Mono for labels and stamps
• Rules: lockup never on a photo; orange only for large text and graphics; calendar marks reuse the seal (done = filled stamp, missed = dashed circle, the day after a miss = small orange underline)
• Voice: a calm coach who has restarted too. Numbers belong to the plan (4 weeks, 20 minutes), never to results.

Existing: the two direction boards above (cover concepts, palettes, lockups). To be made (see list below): covers, one log page each, listing thumbnail, seal variants.

• The final direction for each product is still pending; this case shows the options and their trade-offs.
• Constraint: identity only so far. Neither product has final interior pages yet, so this case shows the system, not the finished goods.
• Constraint: the "no claims" rule shaped the visuals as much as the copy — no babies, no bodies.
• Next: build one real log page per product and print it on a cheap inkjet in draft mode to check the line weights.
• Next: align the Comeback seal frame exactly with the Gym manual seal so the bundle reads as one series.