Included on the board are natural untreated wood, concrete, and flat white paint. There are many spaces for pause among the dense information, transparencies allowing for a continuous experience. I used the board to begin to hammer out the tangible feeling of the brand at every experience touchpoint through materials, physical space, typography, plant life, and color themes.

For typographic solutions, I began with “bold and clean, establishing the collective as authorities in their respective fields, professional as well as caring and fun.” This basis and the collective’s retro interests led me to a few possibilities for type solutions for the original considerations. I ended up creating a hybrid of Grumpy typeface tracked out with a little more fun visual interest by blending weights and utilizing floating ascenders. More on type below.

Also included in the board are some Header and Body copy type solutions, tertiary colors, and ideas for photo overlays in marketing. These elements were included to inspire the collective to take some risks and explore their own personalities, while still being able to count on a design language that will work for the brand as a whole. This display takes the ground-up thinking out of the equation and allows the collective to do what it does best.

An abundance of natural light streams through the windows of a historic building in the hip spot of Yaletown, B.C. This is the setting for Well-Beings, a holistic health collective, featuring multidisciplinary health and therapeutic professionals.

There are up-sides and some not-so-great features of the locale for a new business. Positives include those beautiful windows, easy street access, and a variety of immediate display options to pull in guests.


But with those pro’s come some issues. Namely, the biggest negative of being part of a larger stylized building, is the similarity of each shop from the outside of the building.

Thus, the importance of the plant life (maybe a little less than the plant shop pictured), and the inclusion of beautiful natural-feeling art by Carlos Colin.

This sandwich board (and other art) by Carlos Colin were integral to the design process. The artist is a close friend of people in the collective, and they intended to show his work in the building, as well as commission a special one-of-a-kind sandwich board for the sidewalk outside the collective, to draw people in. Since this would be a very important interactive point on the user journey, I played off the bold lines and retro color scheme and the natural and exposed elements in my design iterations.

The main logotype is based loosely on Grumpy typeface. Here’s some of its history from Typewolf:

”

Grumpy is a heavy, high-contrast serif typeface designed by Tomi Haaparanta and released through Suomi Type Foundry in 2011. The design of Grumpy was inspired by ITC Grouch, a typeface that was originally adapted from the heavier weights of Caslon. Grumpy contains six optical variants with over 2000 hand-adjusted kerning pairs to give it that “tight, not touching” style that was popular in the 1970s.”



Retro type headlines with easy to read and calming body copy. This was the general guiding principle I stuck to. I presented three sets of Header and Body copy type solutions to take the ground-up thinking out of the equation and allow Well-Beings to communicate. consistency across platforms.

Since Well-Beings is such a unique offering to a well-established industry, I needed to bridge the logo and brand elements to the familiarity of imagery present in the industry. I went straight to the ideal of botanical or floral elements, but not done in the same computer-graphics clean style that is typically seen in the segment. Holistic health and continuous improvement, but coming from a place of humanity, of liveliness, of real experiences.



This drove my thinking and iterating towards hand-drawn botanicals elements. I landed on a very rough sketch of flowers with long stems reaching out like a yoga class, to subtly communicate a group acting as a whole towards wellness goals.

For elements to pair with the type, I looked to vintage signage and bold graphic elements reminiscent of mid-century designs through the 70’s. With these, I leaned into shapes and forms as bold visual conversation-starters.



I looked to patterns and bold graphical elements from the 50’s through 70’s, as well as Colin’s work, for inspiration. This led to large graphic elements, including sputnik- or rays-style motifs, thick botanicals, and circles/moons/cyclical motifs.