In 2024, many of my friends and I had a new years resolution surrounding the same activity: running. To make it more enjoyable and social, we agreed to start attending Parkruns around Brisbane each week. Although attendance fluctuated throughout the year, we all completed the Bridge to Brisbane giving us the motivation to end the year off strong. As a reward to ourselves for a year of running, we wanted to make merch using the name of our group chat “park run fun!”.

Our main criteria for the merch was for it to reflect the attitudes we often had towards running early on a Saturday morning (often unenthusiastic), and be recognisable so we could spot each other on the course and at the finish line.

I chose to go down a more vintage sportswear inspired path, drawing from New Balance advertising campaigns and the Mexico 1968 Olympics branding. We noticed so many attendees wear a lot of dark colours and blues, so we chose a bright red to be stand out. The red was slightly deepened and paired with a light cream to balance the colour. We all received them for our final group Parkrun of the year (our Christmas breakup) and looked fab despite not feeling it.

Branding created in Illustrator.