FastWalker is a movement that promotes race walking as a fun and challenging form of athleticism. It offers training, community development, and events. This new fitness organization needed branding to help make their efforts tangible—a look and feel that could be applied to their website, events, apparel, and more.
I learned fascinating background information during the project. Did you know that the fastest race walkers in the world are doing 6-minute miles? Few athletes are at that level, of course. But walking faster than other people are running is quite possible with the right form. The FastWalker Group has resources to teach us how to walk faster, get a great workout, meet other people, and even compete in races.
The design for this athletic brand needed to look accessible, upbeat, robust, and dynamic. Fast walking is a form of exercise that people of many ages and fitness levels can do, from beginners to Olympic athletes, so appealing colors and a straight-forward, clean style make it easy to engage with.
The brand guidelines document shows the basic elements of the visual identity: fonts, colors, how to add city names and other designations to the basic logo to create more lockups, how to mix in dynamic shapes on layouts, and what style of photos to use. This manual helps future designers keep the look and feel on track.
Mockups, including a website home page with sample sections, show organizers and developers how the theme can be applied.
In this stage before there’s actual copy, I often write placeholder text to give the client ideas.
After the FastWalker event branding was designed, we used the walker silhouette on posters to promote Olympic race walking. Although dozens of countries bring race walking teams to the Olympics, the US brought no competitors to Paris in 2024. The FastWalker Group hopes to re-popularize race walking as a sport in the US, setting its sights on LA 2028.
