New Balance is one of the world’s leading brands in running shoes and sports equipment, so when we were asked to create the design for the mini-site "Winter Challenge 2024," it felt like a fun and exciting project.
New Balance is one of the world’s leading running shoes and sports equipment brands. This campaign was led by their UK division.
Strava is the world's largest training community, with over 100 million users in 195 countries.
The challenge is to run 30 kilometers in 30 days, aimed primarily at recreational runners who want to get back into it after the winter break. The training data comes from Strava, and the task was to visualize this data in a fun and accessible way. It was important to strike a balance where experienced runners could satisfy their need for numbers and stats, but without the focus being solely on performance.
Early in the project, we decided to create a "digital medal" with the key figures, designed to be easily shared in an attractive way.
To visualize the data and add a little surprise, it was decided to divide users into a number of "spirit animals" based on their training patterns. This was done to shift the focus away from performance and deepen the campaign's message "Run your Way."
Examples of these roles include:
After a sketching process, we found the right style for the illustrations and also incorporated the sharp shapes from the logo to strengthen the connection to New Balance.
In addition to the key figures shown on the medal itself, we select other numbers that might be interesting for the runner. This can vary depending on the data we gather.
For a runner who has struggled up a lot of hills, elevation gain is probably something they would want to show off, while someone else might have focused on the social aspect and run with friends. We aim to find the most interesting data points to highlight for the user.
The project was carried out as a collaboration between Republic, Tigertech, and New Balance's communications agency, Mediahub.