Stillpoint Yoga London offers Ashtanga yoga and mindfulness classes, workshops and retreats in London, abroad and online.
Developing the design concepts
Scott Johnson had been running early morning Ashtanga yoga classes at London Bridge for several years without any firm identity or branding. He’d been working with Wildheart for a few years and knew he needed to create a unified and memorable brand to take Stillpoint to the next level. But, like most yoga businesses, it was a big decision for him to take the plunge and commit to a new project with us. We’re so glad he did, and it’s been so rewarding to see him grow the Stillpoint Yoga brand.
One of the challenges we faced is that the full brand name is made up of three words: Stillpoint Yoga London. This is always tricky when it comes to designing a logo, and most successful brands are only one or two words. Scott was worried that if we just used ‘Stillpoint Yoga’ it wouldn’t match the domain name of his website. But, with a strong memorable logo and branding, this concern soon evaporated.
Stillpoint Yoga logo - concept 1
Scott often referred to Stillpoint Yoga London as SYL for brevity. Our first concept used this abbreviation to create a handwritten, almost spray-painted, brand mark. We chose an elegant sans-serif font to contrast the urban brand mark.
Stillpoint Yoga logo - concept 2
In this logo concept we explored the idea of a ‘still point’ using a hand-painted circle and line with a nod to Japanese Zen brush work. At this stage we started the discussion of dropping the word ‘London’ from the logo, as it was clear that three words was too long and perhaps even redundant. We used a light and clean sans-serif font for the brand name to contrast the loose brush strokes of the brand mark.
Stillpoint Yoga logo - concept 3
In this concept we took a dive into sacred symbolic imagery, creating a stylised mandala with a focal or ‘still point’ at the centre of the design. A mandala is a geometric meditation symbol used by practitioners and adepts for creating a sacred space. We contrasted the very solid geometric brand mark with a light slab-serif font.
The final logo
This logo evolved over time as we eventually dropped ‘London’ from the brand name and added the strapline. We also flipped the brand mark to appear first. The logo really came to life when we added colour.
Creating a style guide
We created a striking colour palette to match this impactful logo. All the colours in the palette are strong, which means a disciplined application is needed to avoid colour usage becoming overwhelming. In order to achieve this, we divided the palette into primary and secondary colours. The primary colours are the Red Grape and Sky Blue used in the logo. The other colours are used sparingly in different ways.
For the headings and body copy we used a single sans-serif font in different weights and sizes. This can be a good alternative to pairing different fonts if there’s enough variation of font weight and size.
Applying the style guide to the website
We applied the logo, colour palette and fonts to the Stillpoint website and to email marketing templates for Scott. We also created a colour guide for him so he could create new pages using the same colours, ensuring consistency as the website grew over time.
The work we did gave Stillpoint a great foundation from which to grow and evolve. These evolutions are ongoing and have included the introduction of a very popular yoga blog and podcast.
Client feedback
“The last 12 months have seen an enormous amount of change and growth for our business and Wildheart has been with us all the way, helping us evolve how we nurture our audience and support our community.
But the best thing of all is that with Guy we have a supportive and encouraging marketing expert just a Skype call away. He’s our ‘go-to-Guy’ for all our digital marketing strategy and we see our relationship with Wildheart as like having our very own marketing department.”
– Scott Johnson