Branding & Illustration: Nudge

In 2012 I was contacted by a co-founder of a yet-to-launch service. He needed branding and a character design to help his prospective customers reach their goals.

Role: Branding Designer Branding Design, Character Design, Illustration 2012

Before the launch of Alo Moves, the yoga and fitness training app, the founders were calling the service Nudge. The concept for the app was simply to encourage users in accomplishing their goals, whatever they may be. It would provide alerts / texts or emails according to users preference and offer reminders+encouragement for the user's designated purpose. This could be goals in fitness, learning a new skill, or projects in your life like home improvement.

A quick sketch during a conversation gave us our first road to explore, if Nudge was a friendly companion to support is in a task by gentle reminders, what about 'man's best friend' giving us that little push. We had already explored fonts, looking for something that was strong and modern. After some discussion, and despite the popularity of Gotham at the time, we landed on Franklin Gothic because it has a bit more character.

The dog idea developed quickly into something different, more on that later, but with in consultation, we decided to have a simple typemark do the same work of the dog. I progressed from the simple name in Franklin Gothic, then let the N do the nudging, and then softened the corners to enhance the feeling of friendliness for the mark.

Our goals were to have something that felt friendly, supportive, but also strong. We dug into color theory research including Victoria Finlay's book: Color: A Natural History of the Palette. We found Orange coming forward with connections to enthusiasm and courage, and red as its stronger cousin with more of a focus on passion and action. Purple gave us our empathy and inspiration.

The dog was feeling like it lacked intelligence as a supporter, and rather than have an anthropomorphized dog, the team settled on a robot named, whose name became "Cody" a reference to the codebase the developers were working on. I developed a simple silhouette with a floating head / torso, and began developing different methods for him to be rendered, flat/outlined and with some simple 3D form. The character would, depending on your goals, be styled in different clothes and looks according to his purpose for you. ​​​​​​​

The company pivoted a few times in the early days, and while the name Cody stuck for a time as the name of the app, they never put our little friend to use.