Our Role
Art Direction, Brand Identity, Brand Writing, Motion Graphics, Research and Strategy, Video Direction
The business of being
As we got to know Derik and Ryan, we began to understand the extent of their dedication to building a business on the tenets of yoga. Writing in a Medium post in 2017, Derik states: “Regardless of religion, culture, age, or political views, something we all share in common is the human condition. Yoga is the lifelong process of investing in the quality of our condition. YogaGlo’s intention is to empower people around the world to engage in this process.” Their every decision is guided by these principles, from production quality (which is simple, unadorned, and direct) to UX (which combines self-directed navigation and precise search functionality with elegant curation and effective recommendation).
“Today marks a shift towards more contemporary design, another milestone in the evolution of our brand. ”
Derik Mills, Founder and CEO, Glo
“Our collaboration with Glo presented an opportunity for Athletics to shift the narrative away from digital experiences as tools for distraction.”
Zander Abranowicz, Brand Writer, Athletics
Immersing ourselves in an ancient practice
Knowing that Derik drew significant inspiration from the ancient Sanskrit epic poem, The Bhagavad-Gita, our team read (or re-read) a recent verse translation of the poem by Amit Majmudar, published by Knopf in March, 2018. In parallel to immersing ourselves in the philosophical foundations of yoga—and Glo—we thoroughly explored the Glo platform from a user’s perspective. Taking classes on our own in the comfort of our homes, team members—ranging from general health and wellness enthusiasts to active practitioners of yoga—familiarized themselves with the teachers, classes, and functionality that our brand identity would help deliver.
Yogic Branding
In classical yoga, there are 112 ways for humans to live their full potential. Yoga seeks to harmonize these 112 ways of living in a single being. Similarly, we realized, a brand reaches its full potential by operating and synchronizing many mechanisms working simultaneously. Products, spaces, communications, experiences, engagement, UX, content, culture—all of these expressions are united by a single identity system. This informed the brand’s singular, focused quality. Regardless of the communication, the brand feels harmonized, hopefully inspiring audiences to seek that harmony in their daily lives, on and off the mat.
“Athletics gave us a beautiful logo form that can stand alone and still feels strong and like an accurate representation of us.”
Danielle Hutchens, Lead Designer, Glo
Designed for human connection
The central challenge of this project was extending the fundamentally physical practice of yoga to a digital space. Ultimately, the resultant brand is characterized by its sense of balance and symmetry, its ample negative space (intended to be a visual respite from our often manic digital lives), its strategic imperfection (achieved through the use of hand-rendered textures and an imperfectly-symmetrical logo), and its union of serif and non-serif typography, indicative of yoga’s role as a bridge between past and present.
Glo is currently rolling out its new brand identity across channels. We’re excited to see how audiences around the world embrace this new way of practicing, and interpreting, yoga.