Payboy HR

Payboy runs HR and payroll for small and mid-sized businesses across Singapore. Its customers are restaurant owners, clinic managers, accountants and founders. People running a business, not people running an HR department.

The old identity did not say that. A soft lowercase mark in slate and peach, built around an abstract droplet, read like a wellness app. It was quiet in a category where everyone else is loud.

The bigger problem was underneath. There was no colour range, no illustration, no system. Marketing had no way to make a campaign for restaurants look different from a campaign for accountants, because there was nothing to make it different with.

The new wordmark is heavy and geometric, set in Payboy Blue. Flat-sided letters with tight counters, so it holds together printed small on a trade booth and still has presence across a billboard.

The idea that turns it from a logo into a system: any letter can be replaced by an icon. A megaphone for the P, a basketball for the O, a wine glass for the Y. Each icon stands for an industry Payboy serves, so the mark can dress itself for whoever it is talking to. On screen the letters cycle through the set.

This is where most of the work went, and it is what makes the brand recognisable from across a room.

The style is a scrappy hand-drawn line, deliberately unpolished, because the audience is people who built something themselves and can smell a corporate stock photo from a distance. Colour is used sparingly: one object in a scene gets filled, the rest stays as line.

It grew into two libraries. Set A holds the main scenes, the hero tableau, the 404, the onboarding moments. Set B holds humans, hundreds of them, drawn as modular figures the team can recombine into a new scene without a designer.

The site was rebuilt around the identity rather than decorated with it. The hero carries the full tableau under one line of copy in the display face, and the review badges sit directly beneath, because trust is the first thing an SME buyer looks for and burying it costs conversions.

Structure and components were built in Figma with shared tokens, so the site and the campaign material draw from the same source.

Templates in square and story format, built on the palette and the figure library. Each vertical gets its own accent colour and its own cast, so a post aimed at a restaurant and a post aimed at an accounting firm read as the same brand speaking to different rooms.

The templates are the deliverable. Marketing produces a week of posts without a designer opening a file.

Payboy now reads as a modern platform rather than a small local tool. The identity is defined, the site structure matches how people actually shop for HR software, and the content gives both new and existing users a clearer way in.

The part that keeps paying: the team owns an asset library deep enough to run campaigns on their own. No stock illustration, no design request for every post.

Two customer films. Both use the brand's own line work, animated over live footage rather than dropped on top of it, so the illustration reads as part of the scene.