Brand Identity and Apparel Design for Active Wear Brand

OBJECTIVES

Cassidy Athletic Co Founders and Deadheads Grant Darwin and Michael Goland commissioned Ulysses Design Co to build an activewear brand that alternative music fans would connect to. Read on to see how we helped this Brooklyn based alternative activewear brand create a brand identity that speaks to their counter culture audience and represents their brand values.

STRATEGY

Cassidy is a reference to beat poet Neal Cassady. He was the inspiration behind the notorious Dean Moriarty in Jack Kerouac's ‘On The Road’. He also lived with the Grateful Dead in their San Francisco house during the 1960s and the summer of love. We wanted to build a brand identity for activewear brand Cassidy to have the spirit of the 60s. 

During our brand strategy session we defined the mission statement as “Active wear to express your personality”. As gym junkies and Deadheads, the co-founders saw a gap in the market to have comfortable and functional athletic wear that looked like wearing a band t-shirt. Now we had our market position, we were able to start to fill it.

PROCESS

To marry counterculture and fitness, we created a custom logotype that featured 60s inspired expressive swooshes with a vintage baseball vibe. It feels classic, nostalgic and athletic all at the same time. We created a responsive logo family that looks stylish and legible in all manor of applications. From the lettermark for social media avatar to the primary logo for main brand activations it all works cohesively.

DESIGN

Building on the responsive logo family, we created a suite of hand drawn icons to represent Cassidy’s brand values. These included mountains, the sun and waves to represent the natural environment athletes compete with. It also included a record player and a third eye to represent psychedelic music. We created a primary and secondary brand colour palette for brand flexibility.

We wrapped up the project by designing a limited run of apparel designs to launch the brand. Themes included Grateful Dead songs and the infamous counter culture festival Human Be-In, reimagined as a fun run. 

The result of this project was an activewear brand that any alternative music fan would feel represented in while working out or on the street.