Taking Hintsa from a founder brand to a method brand

Building a brand for Hintsa, the coaching company helping individuals and companies achieve sustainable high performance, with methods proven in Formula 1 and Fortune 500.

Do you know who you are?
Do you know what you want?
Are you in control of your own life?

These three questions were always the first the late doctor and physician Aki Hintsa asked patients at the outset of his relationship with them. Ranging from household name athletes to top CEOs, Hintsa’s clients came to him to improve their health, wellbeing and performance, holistically.

Though Hintsa’s questions are deceptively simple, answering them can be difficult, necessitating a period of soul searching. Whoever these questions are put to must grapple to find their true identity and purpose in life. While the coaching programmes that followed were fairly straightforward and rarely contained advice clients hadn’t heard before (to get a good night’s sleep, reduce alcohol and move your body every day, for example), by asking these questions Hintsa helped clarify the client’s real motivations to change. The result: sustainable, long-lasting improvements to health, wellbeing and performance.

Today, Aki Hintsa’s legacy lives on through Hintsa Performance, the coaching company he founded. This triad of questions continues to be at the core of the Hintsa method. Our challenge was to create a brand that could embody this spirit of inside-out approach with the impressive ethos and experience of the founder while growing the company to a generation beyond him.

The wordmark for the brand was completely reimagined. Moving away from being a founder brand signified by a signature wordmark, the new wordmark was designed to signify the elegance and quality of the organisation, increasing legibility and gravitas. Each letter was crafted and refined by Hot Type for optimum balance.

Inkeeping with the ideas of balance and harmony, we created a typographic system and a grid system that can be applied across all Hintsa's touchpoints, from print materials to the company website. The website was designed by Nordkapp and developed by Paper Planes based on brand assets created at Proxy.