Fitness Brand Design – 7 Tips

Running a fitness business takes more than renting out a space, procuring gym equipment, and sharing posters around the neighborhood. You need a better strategy to stand out. This is where the importance of fitness brand design comes in.

According to Zippa, there are approximately 200,000 fitness clubs globally. But don’t settle for that figure. More and more fitness clubs streak into existence daily.

And before you can cut through the noise to take the stage, you must make your brand memorable. You have to ensure your fitness brand is fully etched in the minds of your customers and potential prospects.

Not sure how to do that? No problem. We will take you through seven proven design tips to help you create a memorable fitness brand below.

Carry out audience research

There are several sub-niches in the fitness industry ranging from fitness supplement and product providers, in-house personal trainers, yoga and bodybuilding fitness coach, and remote fitness trainers. 

Before you can engage in a memorable fitness brand design, you need to know which sub-niche you’re focusing on. That helps you figure out who your audience is. 

Let’s say you offer in-house fitness services. Your target audience is most likely working-class people from ages 40 to 60 since they are more concerned about privacy and also have less time to visit public gyms.

And, of course, you can decide to be the jack of all trades offering all the fitness services. In that case, almost everyone will be your target audience. But that can make your brand-defining strategy much more complex.

Knowing your audience helps you create a proper design journey and gives you a holistic view of how your designs should look – Sassy, semi-classic, playful, or professional. From there, you can engage your design tools and extras like Procreate chain brushes or Procreate comic brushes to roll out timeless brand designs.

Moreover, properly conducted audience research will help you determine what type of content format your audience interacts with most and where they do so.

Study your competitors’ design patterns

While creating your fitness brand design guideline from scratch is a good idea, there are better approaches. For example, you can dissect your competitors’ design patterns, brand visuals, and graphics to see what’s unique about them.

This is particularly effective for new startups without an existing record in the fitness industry.

Note that you’re not just picking competitors at random. If you plan to operate a local fitness brand, your competitors should be other local fitness brands. Of course, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t check out other non-local competitors for insights.

Once you understand their design patterns, you can break down your reports into simple points for deeper analysis. Recognize the little differences between each brand design that you see. Those are the things that will help you add an element of uniqueness to your designs.

And the more unique your brand designs are, the more memorable they become. 

Discover your brand’s tone

Your brand’s tone is how you want people to see or hear you speak.

Let’s say you run a weightlifting fitness facility. Your preferred tone of voice will be masculine and power-filled. This applies to your logo, flyers, and website design. You definitely want your audience to see you with some convincing heavy bulges.

However, you don’t have to be rigid when creating your brand tone. Adopting the usual tone of voice in an industry ultimately eliminates your chance to be unique. Yes, fitness brands are mostly known for power displays and six packs designs. But the same approach might not necessarily work for you.

For example, Duo’s brand tone is goofy and simple, different from what you’d expect a language education platform to have. You can see visuals of the bickering Duo and Dua Lipa all over TikTok. 

Similarly, BlenderBottle, a protein powder and fitness brand, adopted a non-masculine tone of voice in communicating with its audience. Their brand designs are much simpler and soft.

When finding your tone of voice, you need to reference your brand’s mission statement. A mission statement contains the values your brand has to offer. 

Knowing this will help you create a proper document that highlights the following:

• how you want people to see you when offering that value,
• and how you don’t want people to see you.

Then you can outline the adjectives that align with the two “hows” above. For example, do you want to be proactively transparent and thoughtful or playful and familiar? Put it there.

You can add as many as possible adjectives that fully express your preferred tone of voice.

Define your font style and color palette 

Now that you already know how you want people to see your fitness brand, it’s time to sort out your design style. Your typeface or font style is important as it reflects your brand’s personality – whether traditional or modern, elegant or playful, minimalist or complex.

But that shouldn’t be an issue since you already know your brand tone. If your brand’s tone preaches simplicity and goofiness like Duo, you can use modern sans-serif typefaces such as comic sans.

Your color plays another crucial role that could break or make your brand design. 

For example, blue conveys professionalism and reliability. However, using it as a primary color in your palette might not be a good fit for a women-only fitness facility. On the other hand, red communicates more energy and fiery passion – that’s better. Then blue can come in as the secondary color.

What matters is breaking out of the norm with your brand designs. So you’re free to explore any color you believe will represent your fitness brand better and make it more memorable.

Create a definitive and reflective brand logo

Logos represent the face of your brand. Flyers and website designs change every single time. But your logo is constant. And even in cases where a revamp is necessary, there is usually not much difference. 

Take Coca-Cola as a case study. From 1950 till now, there have been almost ten different revamps. However, if you were sent back in time, you’ll still be able to recognize Coca-Cola’s logo because it’s design principles and mission statement remain almost the same.

When creating your fitness brand’s logo, you should ensure it is definitive and standard across all your marketing channels. Moreover, it should convey the core values of your brand.

Let’s take a look at Equinox. This is one of the top leading fitness centers in America. Equinox’s brand focuses on luxury, and they seamlessly represent that with their logo style and fonts. Not too complex, not too exaggerated.

Of course, your logo doesn’t have to be as plain and luxurious as Equinox’s. You can be expressive with image icons and colorful illustrations.

Prioritize design consistency

Design consistency means representing your brand the same way across your marketing channels. So if customers get to your fitness website, they should see the same logo, color, and design styles.

Prioritizing design consistency helps your brand remain memorable and easily recognizable, especially on social media. And one of the ways to maintain consistency with your designs is to use branded templates.

Branded templates follow the same design style and guidelines. That saves your team a lot of time when creating new content since they don’t have to start from scratch. 

Keep your designs simple but relevant

It’s important that you don’t confuse memorability with complexity. Keeping your designs simple helps them stand out, even better and unique, compared to when you stack a series of colors and a variety of font styles together.

And don’t forget to keep your visuals relevant. Your social media designs and website graphics must fully portray your brand’s values in such a way that even a random lead is able to identify what services you offer.

Some of the ways to remain simple and relevant is to use a single primary color. For example, Duolingo uses mainly green color, and that’s their signature color. 

Sticking to a particular font is also important. Take Equinox’s textual logo as an example. The logo was designed primarily from the Futura typeface with some simple tweaks to convey modernity and luxury.

Conclusion

Keeping your fitness brand memorable means making it the next go-to option for your target audience, even when there are other competitors in the market. While you can do that by offering the best fitness services, your brand designs similarly play a vital role. And the more your brand sticks to mind, the more chances of increasing your customer base.

For a start, conduct audience research to know who your designs appeal to. Then study your competitors’ design patterns to see what sets them apart. Afterward, define your brand’s tone and use that to develop creative styles that align with your values. Ensure your logo is definitive while prioritizing the consistency of other designs across your marketing channels. And finally, keep things simple but relevant.