How do running and raving come together? Studio Loutsis had some ideas for Running Order’s RUN2RAVE

Running Order, a luxury fashion and athletic brand had an interesting idea for an event – an 8k, music-filled run that seamlessly turns into a rave. When they began looking for a partner to bring this to life, they found one in Renegade, an Oakland-based running apparel shop with a 2000-strong running club. Running Order brought the idea and Renegade brought the community and space to hold the event. The novel idea needed an identity to match, so Running Order reached out to Brooklyn-based Studio Loutsis to not just create an identity, but also a world that it would live in. When the team at the studio drew a Venn diagram of running and raving, they quickly found the overlap – a sense of euphoria. “Early on in the conceptual phase of the process, we arrived at euphoria as a shared feeling when runners experience a ‘high’ and when ravers are lost in the music while dancing,” Founder & Creative Director Taylor Loutsis tells us. “We decided to translate this shared sensation of getting lost into the art direction, bringing in cloudy, milky visuals to symbolise the distant world we mentally escape to in either state of mind.” As he points out, the experience of both running and raving toggle between feeling the energy of those around you, yet “are hyper-individualised in how one performs in a race or how they experience their intimate world on the dance floor.” The concept led the team straight to a hazy, atmospheric brand world, where everything blurs, pulling in and out of focus. Amidst this setting, the wordmark (R2R) sometimes hides in the backdrop of posters or jumps into focus, such as in the environmental graphics. The typography of the custom mark draws notes from posters in rave culture, while seeking a sense of movement, “mirroring the movement of runners and ravers,” Loutsis explains. “The founders of Running Order loved how the wordmark has an extended length that is reminiscent of a moving body caught mid-air or mid-motion.”