Glo

Intelligent Twist

Our Role

Art Direction, Brand Identity, Brand Writing, Motion Graphics, Research and Strategy, Video Direction

Building physical wellness in digital space

A digital solution from humble beginnings

Empowering our users to own their own practice

Maintaining balance from YogaGlo to Glo

Building physical wellness in digital space. Glo was founded by brothers Derik and Ryan Mills in 2008 with the objective of making the ancient practice of yoga accessible and readily available to modern audiences.

A digital solution from humble beginnings. Considerate of the modern tendency to under-value quiet time to practice physical and mental discipline, Glo originally launched with three classes on a simple digital platform.

Empowering our users to own their own practice. It has since grown to an extensive library of subscription-based content taught by some of the world’s best yoga instructors and wellness experts.

Maintaining balance from YogaGlo to Glo. In 2018, Athletics was enlisted to develop a brand identity and language system to promote the brand’s pivot from purely yoga to a more integrated wellness offering.

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.

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Prepared visuals spanned yoga apparel including pants and mats.

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.

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As part of the rebrand Glo's internal design team re-photographed the company's vibrant team of instructors.

“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.

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