Runaway™ Marathon Series
A family of brand identities and websites for a new international marathon series, including Queenstown Marathon, Hawke's Bay Marathon & Noosa Marathon.
Project Overview
In 2014, the new Queenstown International Marathon was set to take the world by storm – and Amplifier was tasked with creating a brand identity and website that would do justice to the marathon's 'flat out beautiful' location. It wasn't hard to be inspired by Queenstown's scenery, so we took direct influence from the Remarkables mountain range, and the flat course below it, when designing the QM 'crown' brandmark.
One year on we branded Queenstown Marathon's new sister event, the Hawke's Bay Marathon, with a nod to the region's vineyards. The success of both events eventually lead to the creation of the Runaway™ Marathon Series, a family of initially seven marathons that finally encompassed Queenstown, Hawke's Bay and Noosa Marathon.
We reviewed the existing brand icons for QM & HBM to create an overarching brand & identity system for the Runaway™ series, and built this out over event websites, merchandise, signage, maps and medals.
Exploration
Referencing the already established Queenstown and Hawkes Bay logos, we explored the creation of a series of elements to represent the geographical location of each new marathon, applied to a grid system. The repetition of stokes, triangles and waves represent the vineyards, mountains, rolling hills, land and sea, unique to each region.
We reviewed potential colours across all marathon brands to evoke the different 'personality' of each location.
The Runaway Identity
Inspired by movement and direction, the Runaway brandmark was designed to represent movement, to marry the existing icons and to influence the design of future icons for upcoming events.
A flexible family of websites
We designed and built the Queenstown Marathon website to showcase the client's stunning Queenstown imagery alongside their large amount of information. We developed a modular layout and CMS functionality that allows for easy updates by the client, and a framework that they were able to carry across the whole brand family. As always, the site's usability and mobile responsiveness were key considerations in the design and build.
Photography ©Runaway Marathon Series