Brand identity · Product design · Watch

Apsia

Train with the tide, not against it.

Client: Personal project, brand and product concept
Sector: Sport, running and recovery
Role: Brand and product designer
Scope: Identity, iPhone app, Apple Watch app, Apparel

Lone runner on a winding moorland road at dusk, a soft mint light glowing above the hills

The brief

A plan that listens to the morning.

Challenge

Most running apps hand you a static plan and expect your body to follow it. But readiness moves every day. Sleep, stress and recovery all shift, and runners end up pushing hard on a morning their body had nothing to give.

Approach

Read the recovery signals each morning, HRV, resting heart rate and sleep, and answer one question: push, or recover? The plan bends to the body, but the call stays with the runner. A coach that suggests, not a plan that commands.

Identity

A name taken from an orbit.

ap·sis

Apsia, from apsis, the turning point of an orbit. The far point is the apoapsis, the near one the periapsis. Readiness becomes a position on that orbit: primed at apoapsis, protecting recovery near periapsis.

Wordmark and symbol: a four-point star held inside an orbit.

Apsia symbol, a four-pointed star inside an orbit, in tone-on-tone mint

Black training jacket with the mint Apsia symbol embroidered on the chest

Colour and type

Colour only carries state.

Two signals on a near-black canvas. Mint means ready or on pace. Rosé means strain or recovery. Nothing is coloured for decoration, and on a low readiness day the whole product shifts tone.

Forearm in warm light, dappled with patches of mint-coloured light

Mint#4DF5B0

Rosé#E28C9F

Graphite#131419

Canvas#08090B

76ReadinessApoapsis · Push
7h31SleepLast night
62msHRVMorning reading
52bpmResting heart rateMorning reading

Swipe to see every signal →

Big numbers, readable mid-stride. Space Grotesk carries the large data, readiness score, pace and time, and a mono sets the labels. The type is made for glancing, not reading.

Product design

One question, every morning.

Instead of another progress ring, the home screen shows your state as a single glowing node on an ellipse. The node's position is the readout, no raw score to decode.

Morning
Readout
Sleep, HRV and resting heart rate place you on the orbit. High on the arc, a hard session is on the table.
Before the run
The plan adapts
Low on the arc, Apsia offers to swap today's intervals for an easy run, and tells you why. Heat counts too: at 24°C the target pace eases by 6s/km.
After the run
One question
How did it feel? Easier, as planned or harder. Tomorrow's plan takes the answer into account.

Four Apsia phone screens: a readiness score of 76, today's Threshold Tempo session, a live run at 4:46 per kilometre and the post-run check-in — Readiness, today's session, the live run and the check-in. Warm-up and cool-down in rosé, the effort in mint.

During the run, the screen gives one instruction at a time: the pace, and how far off it you are. Pick up 8 seconds, or ease off.

The plan stays readable at every step: blocks, target paces and the reason behind each change.

The swap is an offer, never a lock: the call stays with the runner.

Watch

The watch comes first during a run.

Nobody reads their phone mid-effort. The watch face keeps only the orbit, pace and heart rate, and every state has to read in under a second. When the effort turns to strain or recovery, the face turns rosé.