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Aware: research & branding
Aware's colour palette and identity — derived from feelings, not focus groups.
Aware began as a hackathon proof of concept. Once the concept proved itself, the brand needed to catch up. Here's how we built the identity — starting from a list of feelings and ending with a halo.
§ Role
Design lead
§ Year
2018
Where we started
Aware launched as a proof of concept built over a weekend hackathon. It tested an idea and a market. It did not, however, have anything resembling a coherent brand. The colour palette wandered; the type was placeholder; the logo was a wordmark drawn at 2am.
Good design is aesthetic. Our initial prototype didn’t meet that bar — and aesthetic isn’t decoration. It’s whether someone trusts the thing in their hand.
— with apologies to Dieter Rams
How we found the brand
1. Ask people what they feel
We sent a short survey to 14 users and team members: list five to ten adjectives you associate with mindfulness meditation. The repeating themes were obvious in retrospect — peace, calm, happy, energy, focus, minimal, warmth, environment — but the survey did the important thing, which was take the choice out of one designer’s head.
2. Build a moodboard from the words, not the brief
We searched Dribbble for each keyword and assembled a moodboard. Not for ideas — for the ambient palette. What does peace tend to look like across a hundred different designers’ instincts?
3. Find the colours hiding inside the moodboard
We ran the entire moodboard through a low-poly pixelation pass to flatten it into colour clusters. That gave us an objective read on the palette — primary and secondary colours selected by frequency, not by taste. (Designer taste comes back in soon enough.)
The moodboard, flattened into its colours.
4. Build a wordmark with a halo
The final mark is a circular wordmark with a halo cue — a small visual nod to enlightenment and the crown chakra, fused with clean type. The overlap is deliberate; the symbolism is restrained.
Logo iterations. The halo emerges, slowly.
The final overlap. Two phrases, visually balanced, halo intact.
What it became
A documented palette of emotional colours, paired with a wordmark that meant something the team could explain in a sentence. Cohesive, simple, defensible.
Outcome
The identity carried Aware through the rest of its life as an independent app — and survived, in spirit, into Roundglass Reach.
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