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KHOSLA VENTURES

Designing the Playbook for Founders

Challenge: Design and produce a book for Khosla Ventures in six weeks. Sixty principles from Vinod Khosla, built for founders to actually use, not set on a shelf and forget about.
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Approach: Work with Khosla Ventures Design Partner Michael Gough on the concept, layout system, and production. We landed on the field guide concept early and made every decision through that lens. White space built for notes, a typographic system that keeps the content front and center, and imagery that gives the reader room to breathe between ideas.‍

Contributors:
David Sperry — Creative Direction & Design
Anthony Wiktor — Visual Design
Michael Gough — Editiorial Direction
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Result:
- Delivered complete book design and production in six weeks
- Distributed to founders at Khosla Ventures annual CEO Summit
- Designed foldout 18" x 27" poster included with each book

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Field Guide Concept

From the start, every decision was grounded in one idea: this book should get used, not just displayed. We designed it to be written in, returned to, and carried into the work.

Imagery

The photography was chosen to create atmosphere, not explain the content. Expansive, slightly abstract, and treated to feel more like texture than subject.

Layouts

The layout system is built on contrast and clarity. Each principle gets its own space, direct and unambiguous, with supporting content given room to breathe alongside it.

The Poster

A foldout 18" x 27" poster tucked into the back of every book, designed to open from a single Vinod Khosla quote into the full spread of all sixty principles.

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The Unreasonable playbook - KV

DESIGNING THE
UNREASONABLE
PLAYBOOK

There's more to this project than what you see on the page. We wrote about the process behind the field guide concept, the design decisions the book, and why we made them. Read the full story on our insights blog.

READ THE INSIGHTS