Deliverables
What the club took away.
- Category audit of gym club marks
- Six logo routes, two full directions
- Final logo with star and figure
- Colour palette and typeface
- Usage sheet for every ground
About the brand
North Stars Gymsports coaches gymnastics to young children, building strength, flexibility and coordination in a warm and supportive environment. The club needed an identity that reads as gymnastics instantly, stays friendly rather than competitive, and survives being stitched onto a polo pocket.
Process
How it got there.
- Understand the club
- Audit the category
- Find the ownable idea
- Explore six routes
- Test two on real uses
- Refine and set the rules
Where it lives
The brand out in the world.
Start a branding project01 · Background
A first gym, not a pathway to the podium.
For most children who walk in, North Stars is the first sport they have ever done. A club chasing national titles can afford a serious mark. A club whose members are five and deciding each week whether they still like it cannot. The logo had to win the parent who pays and the child who decides whether there is a second week.
02 · The figure
Every gym club draws the same person.
An abstract figure mid-leap, arms thrown up. It works: it says a body moving before a word is read, it has no age or gender, and it is always rising. But six clubs, six swooshes, and nothing to tell them apart. So the figure stays, anchored to something only this club owns: the star already in its name.
03 · Routes
Working out where the figure sits.
Every route kept the star and the figure and changed how they relate: above the word, leaping across it, standing in it. Two directions were built out on a polo and a page of social posts. The warm yellow route photographed beautifully and fell apart small. The blue route held.
04 · Final logo
The child in the star.
The star replaces the A in STARS, so the mark and the name are one object. The figure stands inside it, arms up, the pose a child makes when they have finished a routine and want you to look. Take the colour out and it still reads, because the figure and the star are separated by shape rather than tone.
05 · In use
Where a club logo actually lives.
Almost none of it is on a screen. It is on a polo at eight in the morning, a t-shirt worn home, an enrolment post, and the trailer that brings the equipment to the hall. That trailer went out wrapped in the mark, so the brand arrives before the gym does.
Colour
The palette
- Electric blue
#17B5F8The star, and the energy - Navy blue
#004476Wordmark and figure - Navy black
#021F33Body copy and uniform - Sky blue
#E1F2FFBackgrounds and panels - White
#FFFFFFGround for the mark
Type
Palanquin Dark
Strength, flexibility, coordination.
- Palanquin DarkRegular
- Palanquin DarkMedium
- Palanquin DarkBold
The typeface the logo is drawn from. Open, rounded forms that stay friendly at a heavy weight.