Project

Reach Up Branding

Project

Reach Up Branding

Client

EMD UK

Industry

Health & Fitness, NPO, Social Responsibility

Services

Healthier communities through group exercise

Services

EMD UK are the official national governing body for group exercise in the United Kingdom as part of Sport England and in partnership with This Girl Can. They support and promote group exercise across the UK, helping to create a healthier and more active nation. Working closely with fitness instructors, class providers and participants they offer training opportunities, funding and resources that help grow and sustain the group exercise industry, making group fitness accessible, inclusive and innovative for all.

With the planned launch of a specialised hub, aimed at equipping group exercise coaches and instructors with resources tailored for those less active, EMD UK enlisted our help with creating brand for the online platform. The new brand needed a strategy, a visual identity and name. This brand would be need to stand alone, and work alongside the This Girl Can partnership brand.

Swipe

The heartbeat

Reach Up – learn, inspire, ignite the fire

We wanted the platform brand to be instantly empathetic to the coaches needs to be able to gain a deeper understanding of their ‘less active’ audience, so they could try new ways in order to inspire them to join group classes. The brand is about educating instructors to help reach their audience as well as help them reach to become more active.

The name ‘Reach Up’ was born out of a process that offered range of ideas that had tried to capture both simplicity and understanding of the brand with something that was inspiring. The new names resonates with EMD UK’s coach and instructor audience to reach for better understanding and inspiration, as well as their own audiences to reach up and getting involved in group exercise.

The strapline harnessed the purpose of the platform itself and its intended outcomes. To help the coaches learn about less active potential participants, breaking down the barriers that may be in there way to taking part; to help coaches inspire their audience in new and different ways that is empathetic, warm and approachable; And to ignite the fire in their audience that not only gets them into group exercise but to stay there.

This strapline also became the proposition for the visual identity, looking at balancing the idea of education and learning with a bright and active look-and-feel that inspires coaches and their audiences.

Swipe

A picture is worth a thousand words

One of the main aims of the new platform is to create an inclusive environment in order to help drive positive health transformations. With this goal in mind, photography quickly became one of the core brand components for the new Reach Up brand world. It’s enables the brand to tell their story in a quick, universally understood and visual way. It sets the tone for the brand, conveys emotion and creates an immediate connection with the group exercise coaches, whose audience is reflected by displaying inclusivity, positivity and diverse experiences.

When thinking about imagery, we focused on five key factors — authenticity, inclusivity, people focus, consistency and tone — in order to create a visual world that was both visually striking and exciting but also felt safe and inspirational.

Illustrating stories

Illustration offered an additional creative solution to help tell stories with the freedom to create content without limits, allowing for a wider scope of expression.

The Reach Up illustration style is simple, clean, freehand and uncluttered – focused on clarity and accessibility. It gives the brand the flexibility to communicate ideas in a more conceptual and playful way, while maintaining anonymity of people less active, and the integrity and warmth of the Reach Up brand.

Swipe

Swipe

Layered layouts

The Reach Up brand is inspired by the idea of planning and vision boards — a place where thoughts, ideas and inspirations come together. Just like Reach Up instructors plan out exercise programmes or plans for their classes, we developed two distinct layout styles — uniform & structured and loose & overlapping — that reflect the diversity of personalities, approaches and work styles within our instructor community, utilising the layering of content and ideas.

These layered layouts allow us to visually represent the idea of building up layer upon layer and showing a brand that leans into the idea of a journey and inspiring those less active to take it one step at a time.

Swipe

Stand alone, stand together

The new Reach Up platform is backed with research by EMD UK in collaboration with This Girl Can. For this reason, although the hub was designed as a standalone branded product, with its own brand identity, the new logo would always be displayed alongside the This Girl Can partner logo.

This meant that our process had to be highly collaborative and inclusive every step of the way, working to the approval of not only the EMD UK board and stakeholders, but also within the strict guidelines and to key stakeholders within brand partners such as This Girl Can, Sport England and London Sport.

Swipe

The Results

Using our highly collaborative, tried and tested brand world process, we have created a brand that is able to live and breathe on its own or sit within alongside This Girl Can.

The new Reach Up identity is both eye-catching, with its bold and vibrant colour palette and instantly engaging with its playful use of layering to display content, creating a modern, dynamic and exciting identity for the new platform.

Along with the identity, our comprehensive guidelines document and brand toolkit have allowed the EMD UK team, as well as all of their instructors and trainers, to easily take the new brand elements and create cohesive content to use within the platform and throughout their social platforms respectively.