Designing 75 Unique Badges for Echelon Fitness!
November 24, 2020
Echelon Badge Design
Echelon Fitness approached me with a task to reinvent an alternative to their badges. Echelon Fitness is a workout streaming company that sells a variety of equipment and hosts trainers to help people all over the world stay or get in shape!
The Goal: Create unique badges that make users want to run, bike, or row 2,000 classes for. These will need to be fun and engaging while also maintaining their status as real amazing achievements.
Process
Researching design styles...
These were the first sets of badges I had ever made, so naturally I took to researching shapes, styles and utilizing the Echelon brand colors to make 15 unique badges for 5 sets of equipment.
First, I took to Pinterest to research tried and true shapes for things like badges, logos, & most importantly, patches that you might sew onto a jacket. After equipping myself with 15 sets of empty boxes I threw myself into the design crunch.
Echelon wanted uniqueness but also wanted styles across the badge type to stay the same for fluidity. This requirement was met with color scheme & shape design across badge types.
Problem
Finding the balance between 'uniqueness vs. readability'
Each badge design required this problem to overcome. On one hand they need to be visible to other users on the leaderboard which means simplicity and large numbers, but on the other they need to be fun and unique enough to want it.
Solve
Building a design philosophy that helps users strive for achievement.
For this unique task I went with a simple 10s badge to get users started, an intro to your new equipment. The next badge you get is design focused which makes users want to keep pushing for an upgrade to their previous 10 style. Then transition back to a simple but effective 50s badge, not too design heavy. Then back to a designer badge and repeat with some variation.
Once you hit the 400-800+ range, users want to show off a bit more, so numbers become very large and a focal point in design. Designs for 1,600 and 1,800 are unique before finally hitting the 2k diamond.
Reflection
Building a framework or design philosophy for projects like these before the design phase helps to improve design quality and deliver faster.
These badges were created in just about 2 weeks, with having to juggle other projects being thrown my way at the same time I really had to organize my thoughts and time to be able to get everything I needed done on schedule. I had a blast designing these and was definitely one of my highlights at Echelon Fitness.
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