I'd love to hear from you
Whether you have a project in mind, or just want to say hi.
Whether you have a project in mind, or just want to say hi.
Shoot me an email
Flow • Yoga Studio
Brand identity system and website design for an East Vancouver yoga studio, exploring how a community-led brand can grow into a commercial space without losing what made people show up in the first place.
Industry
Health & Wellness
Scope
Brand strategy, visual identity, illustration system, website design, print collateral, brand guidelines
Tools
Figma, Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Firefly
Flow began as five friends running yoga in Trout Lake Park. No studio, no website, just a mat in the grass. Within eighteen months, two hundred people a week were showing up through word of mouth alone.
This concept project imagines Flow opening a permanent studio in 2025. The challenge: build an identity that can hold an $89/month membership and a physical space, without losing the reason strangers showed up to a park in the first place
The Problem
Wellness branding takes itself very seriously. It has to, because most of it is selling you a better version of yourself, and that pitch only lands if everyone keeps a straight face. Soft voices, sacred spaces, transformation, alignment, intention. Look at it for too long and the whole category starts to feel like a yoga class you're not allowed to laugh in.
Flow's audience didn't want that. They were people who showed up to a public park because it was free, close, and nobody was watching. They could already tell the difference between a studio that wanted them and one that wanted to perform at them.
So the question I kept coming back to was this: what does a wellness brand look like when it stops performing wellness and just acts like a place you'd actually want to spend time in?
Design Process
- Brief and positioning. Defined the tension at the centre of the project. How does a brand built without trying grow up without trying too hard.
- Category audit. Looked at what wellness brands sell, and decided Flow needed to sell the opposite.
- Strategy. Built the brand around belonging instead of becoming. No perfection required became the position everything else filtered through.
- Visual exploration. Tested four directions: a custom wordmark, an abstract mark, a minimal typographic system, and a character-led identity.
- Identity. Landed on four characters (Calm, Love, Curious, Wonder), each leading a class type, paired with a wordmark that smiles.
- System design. Logo lockups, type scale, palette proportions, illustration rules, photography direction.
- Website. Desktop and mobile, with a custom cursor that swaps between characters as you navigate.
- Guidelines. 32-page document covering strategy, tone, and visual usage.
Three Decisions
A palette that doesn't apologise.Most yoga branding plays it safe with muted tones. Flow goes the other way. Deep forest greens lead, lime co-stars, and the whole palette refuses to fade into the wellness wallpaper. It looks like East Vancouver in early summer, not like a spa anywhere.
Characters as the whole personality.The system isn't a logo with characters added on. The characters are the system. Calm, Love, Curious, and Wonder each lead a class type and carry the brand's emotional range. A logo can tell you what something is. These four can tell you how it feels.
A wordmark that smiles.Transforma carries the personality of the whole brand in one word. The lowercase weight, the rounded forms, the playful "W" at the end every part of the wordmark is doing emotional work. PP Montréal supports it underneath for body and UI, quietly, so the wordmark doesn't have to share the spotlight.
The lime offset treatment turns the characters into objects people actually keep. Stickers on laptops and water bottles do more for the brand than any ad could.
Takeaway
- Strategy and visual design aren't separate stages. They're the same decision made twice.
- Specificity beats aspiration. A palette tied to East Vancouver does more work than a palette designed to feel calm.
- Characters carry warmth that marks can't, but they only work when something else in the system carries the discipline.
- A brand built for community has to feel like an invitation at every scale, from a 164px hero to an 11px caption.
Have a project in mind?
We’d love to hear from you — whether you have a project in mind, or just want to say hi.
Let’s Talk
