A brand with the body at its centre

Client: Jo Reader, counsellor, coach and trainer
Scope: Brand identity, secondary logos, brand guidelines, workbooks, price guide, social templates, website design and build

Jo Reader is a counsellor, coach and trainer who helps women unlearn the generational trauma of body shame. Her work asks women to see their bodies differently, so the brand needed to do more than look good: it needed to embody that shift. Building a visual language that matched the depth of that mission is exactly the kind of work I love doing.

Before we worked together, Jo had nothing tying her work into one recognisable brand. No logo, colour palette, guidelines, or rules to live by. Her website gave information but didn't give much sense of who she was.

Jo now has a system that's unmistakably hers, with bold, curvy typography, a palette of dark cyan and American gold, and hand-drawn body patterns that mirror the people she helps.

Identity

A curvy female figure sits inside the O of her name, so the subject of Jo's work is at the centre of her brand. The hand-drawn patterns are built from that same figure, and they carry it from the logo into everything else she puts out. The letters are heavy and rounded, overlapping and filling their space instead of sitting apart. The swashes keep them lively. Each of her three areas of work has its own secondary logo, with a word in gold script across the wordmark, so they're easy to tell apart while still signalling it's all her.

Colour

Dark cyan sits between blue and green. It has the calm and steadiness of blue and the hope of green, which suits a place to heal without feeling clinical. It's deep, not pastel, so it feels grounded and serious, never fragile. American gold stands for worth. It's warm and a little celebratory, and in work about body shame it says the body is something to value and celebrate, not something to fix. Charm pink rounds out the palette as a secondary colour, adding softness without taking over.

The palette is bold for a reason. Jo's work helps women stop being ashamed of their bodies, and part of that is being willing to be seen and to stand out. The brand takes up space without apology, signalling to her audience that they can do the same, whatever their size or shape.

Social

Jo's social posts needed to feel like part of the brand. The visual system gives her enough recognisable elements to keep them consistent without making every post look the same. Bold colour, pattern, typography and framing work together so her content is identifiable at a glance, building familiarity before someone has even read the post.

Jo makes her own posts from the templates. Alongside examples showing how the layouts can work, she has blank compositions, pattern backgrounds, frames and other brand elements she can combine and adapt. That means the brand can keep evolving through her everyday content without her needing a designer every time she wants to say something new.

Website

The new website needed to make a wide range of work feel clear and approachable, and to give visitors a sense of the person behind it. The structure gives each part of Jo's work its own pathway, from counselling and coaching to supervision and training, so visitors can quickly find what's relevant to them without having to work out the difference themselves.

Photography from a shoot delivered alongside the brand gives Jo a visible presence throughout the site, while the colour, typography and body patterns carry the same visual language across every page.

Jo can keep the site current herself. Course landing pages give each programme room to explain what people need to know, while upcoming course information can be updated as things change. Blog capability gives the thinking behind her work space to grow.

Visit joreader.com