Ride Engine Branding

Ride Engine - a Santa Cruz, California-based company - has become one of the thought leaders in the watersports equipment category - bringing the first hard-shell, fully customizable form-fitting kitesurfing harness to market.

In the fall of 2014, Ride Engine joined forces with Slingshot Sports, and with significantly more bandwidth and resources quickly had the ability to deliver its product to a much larger audience. As the design lead, I worked closely with Ride Engine owner Coleman Buckley, the young Santa Cruz waterman, tinkerer, and inventor of the hard-shell harness - to develop a brand identity for Ride Engine that reflected the exceptional form, function, and performance characteristics of their harnesses. The branding was developed from the ground up - with colors derived from the waves he surfed in Santa Cruz, a custom typeface developed for the Ride Engine wordmark and leveraged in the development of the RE logo, and other supporting marks used across the various product lines.

Today, Ride Engine offers a full line of purposefully built products, including harnesses, surf and foil boards, foils, wetsuits, bags, and other watersports accessories all focused on bringing the best products to market while sustainably growing into the future.