Consider printing this helpful guide and keeping it at hand when developing your new gym brand. Cuoco Black 2015
The design elements, ideas, and practices illustrated in this post are routinely embraced by many gym brands and across all market segments. Luxury gyms, the chains, independents and even CrossFit Boxes employ many of these commonplace and cliché design elements. The elements themselves are not so much the problem as is the blurring of your brand by adopting them. As well, these cross category design ideas are used in all manner of commerce leading to pedestrian and exhausted design trends.
The underlying message.... deliver your own unique brand to your market and reject formulaic design features used by your competition.
BRAND DON'T TREND
The design elements, ideas, and practices illustrated in this post are routinely embraced by many gym brands and across all market segments. Luxury gyms, the chains, independents and even CrossFit Boxes employ many of these commonplace and cliché design elements. The elements themselves are not so much the problem as is the blurring of your brand by adopting them. As well, these cross category design ideas are used in all manner of commerce leading to pedestrian and exhausted design trends.
The underlying message.... deliver your own unique brand to your market and reject formulaic design features used by your competition.
BRAND DON'T TREND
Boutique Design is a beautiful design aesthetic which we often advise against embracing as it says nothing about fitness or a gym brand. However, like every trend, these models cannibalize their own as evidenced by the identical long wood slab in these three different gyms...........If you're going to develop a luxury brand ignore the design features that others use, don't be an upscale gym wannabe. Leave this aesthetic to the luxury gym 1%-ers and be your own brand.
Graffiti was a popular social and political art form reaching its zenith in the late 1970's and early 1980's. Its urban colorful caustic vernacular was initially revered, but then loathed as it became associated with a crime, yet the art continues to be embraced by gyms....it's 2015. For all intents and purposes there is a goldmine of graphic design talent online at websites like 99 Designs that can provide you with graphics that are beautiful, stylish, contemporary and "uniquely marketable".
Slogans There is nothing that de-motivates me more than slogans meant to motivate me. I'm not sure of the intent. Is it subliminal mind mapping or the fact that the brand could find nothing more to fill a blank wall. This design feature borders on pandering and the Internet is overrun with motivational jargon and meme's in our social media feeds. Be original not subliminal.
Stone Walls So many gym brands use this design element as a symbol of strength, warmth and luxury. However, after seeing it gracing the walls of a McDonald's (snobby-sarcasm) McCafe, center image, I knew that it was a luxury design feature that had run its course.
Big Box Design Elements Chandeliers, marble, granite and decorative accessories sourced at the big box stores, the same that your members see when they shop for their homes, have NO place in a gym interior design.
Minimalism "Less is More" is the mantra of this American visual arts phenomena of the 60' and 70's. It's an aesthetic defined as pared-down that has paired-up with boutique design providing gym developers with a style that is simply banal. You can call it sophisticated but I see little that says anything distinctive with this over exhausted cliché.
Hanging Pendant Lights Any undistinguished-unremarkable-unexceptional-featureless light fixtures used for decoration which have no reflection on the brand. If these are married and suspended from an overhead soffit, which mirrors the shape and geometry of the reception desk below, you now exhibit the aesthetic equivalent of a 1st year interior design student's expertise. Go online, there are thousands of fixtures of a finer pedigree than these.
Mirrored Soffits The happy bedfellow of our preceding hanging pendant light feature is the geometrically shaped overhead soffit that mirrors the shape of the reception desk below. Occasionally, this can be done exceedingly well. Often, as in this image, the design feature is too literal and contrived.
Boutique Design Lighting Fixtures The hallmark of the hospitality design industry are these cylindrical lighting fixtures which grace the ceilings of virtually tens of thousands, if not hundreds or thousands of hotels, restaurants, retail stores, condominiums, dry cleaners, Rite Aids and now......fitness facilities. Again, the center and far right images are McDonald's...don't be a McGymDonald's.
HID (High Intensity Discharge) and Fluorescent Lighting This is often difficult to overcome as it's usually bundled with the build out provided by a landlord. However, moving to LED' has many benefits beyond what I can deliver in this post. The greatest disadvantage of these lighting fixtures is the quality of the light washing the interior of a gym, rendering the aesthetic sensibilities to that of the interior of a department store or Home Depot.
Reception Desks Gyms, McDonald's and Boutique Hotels embrace the boutique reception desk design trend....angular, minimal, geometric, sophisticated. Why would any gym brand create a design for a reception desk that was anything similar to these? Because their design team recommended they do.
Case Study This group of images was presented to us by a gym developer submitted as an inspiration board by another design firm. All the cliché's are here...the stone wall, the boutique lighting fixtures, minimalism, the cliché-cliché reception desk.
So, what does this say about his gym's brand?
How do you deliver this to a market and be the dominant player?
How do you prevent your competition from modeling this aesthetic if it’s available for all to copy?
simple.....Brand Don't Trend
So, what does this say about his gym's brand?
How do you deliver this to a market and be the dominant player?
How do you prevent your competition from modeling this aesthetic if it’s available for all to copy?
simple.....Brand Don't Trend
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