The Story
Godly Manly is a men’s lifestyle brand founded by an athletic entrepreneur. The goal was to teach and equip men to become more like Jesus in their masculinity. Beginning as a blog, but with hopes to grow to merchandise, podcasting, training materials, and books, the brand was inherently people focused. The founder was inspired by the superheroes, myth, and lore that characterized some of the most iconic brands like Star Wars and Guardians of the Galaxy. In a world of masculine identity confusion, this story sought to bring clarity to the increasingly muddled conversation.
The Challenge
With such classic inspirations and versatile aspirations, the brand needed to be scalable, generative, and in some sense, iconic. (But it also just needed to get up quickly.) The founder wanted to maintain a funny yet serious brand personality, and with such deep and thoughtful content, the challenge was maintaining that fun personality and connection for the everyday man. Throughout the process, I had to continually simplify the story behind the brand, while still ensuring that its soul still came out in the visuals. This looked like multiple rounds of client revisions and an iterative approach that eventually led to a large conceptual breakthrough at my favorite açaí place (somehow where I get a lot of design breakthroughs). In addition, since the company was a fresh startup without any designers, the brand system had to be simple enough for the founder to implement and use in the early growth stages, in a way that still maintained brand alignment.
The Reverie
The reverie is the Godly Manly Universe, centered around Doulos City. Each reader became their own Godly Manly, and were fighting against the villain of masculine identity confusion. The founder and writer was the Godly Manly archetype, sharing his wisdom and commissioning each reader as a unique Godly Manly in his own proverbial universe. Each article was a new episode in how these numerous Godly Manly’s can save the day for their families, thus making them the hero of the story. Generative brand language was used to maintain the playfully serious personality of the brand, and Reverie provided the slogan “die daily” as the mandate for the Godly Manly’s. Each typeface sought to communicate the identity of the brand, as the primary typeface evokes strong, cinematic “Thor” vibes, the secondary shows strength and clarity, and the tertiary brings the comic book theme. The color palette was designed around the brand’s four pillars of God [blue], Squad [yellow], Wod [green], and Bod [red]. These four colors were then used as overlays for imagery to match the article topic to its respective pillar. Every touchpoint and experience with the brand was stepping into the Godly Manly Universe.
Roles
Art Direction/Branding
Illustration
Brand Language
Photo Credits
Sam Loesch
That's the end of the stories region, phew! The hard work is over, now let’s enjoy some dreaming…