Tonya’s Bakeshop
End-to-end Design for a Personal Training eBook and Fitness Journal // May 2020 - June 2020
The Team
Myself (individual project)
My Roles
Branding, Visual Design, UX Design, Photography
Tools
G-Suite, MS PowerPoint
Brief
Tonya’s Bakeshop is a personal training company founded by Tonya Kok, whose dream is to inspire people to live lives filled with MOVEMENT. Tonya is a NASM certified personal trainer and corrective exercise specialist, and her Train with Tonya: 30 Day Training eBook is a way to share her style of training with everyone, regardless of their level of fitness experience.
The eBook
The Concept
Tonya approached me with the idea of creating an eBook as a way to provide additional education and advice to her existing clients and any one interested in starting their fitness journey. She had a few requirements up front: First and foremost, Tonya needed her eBook to be easy to follow for any user, regardless of their familiarity with training materials. Second, the eBook needed to embrace femininity to show women that pursuing fitness can be for them as well. Third, the overall design needed to derive inspiration from her existing brand, but bring a fresh look that the brand could later incorporate and evolve into as well.
Keywords: Sleek, simple, female empowerment, inspiring
Understanding the Customers
The target audience for the eBook were first and foremost Tonya’s existing clientele. While she does have clients of a wide age range, both male and female, she also runs specialty boot camps and programs targeted towards women. As one of her goals is to empower women in fitness, our eBook audience would be for those women first—specifically, to cutout the intimidation factor of any women entering the world of fitness.
Click here to view an excerpt from the eBook!
The women we decided to target with the eBook were mostly young adults, living in the Bay Area and familiar with technology, as well as with access to a gym and training equipment. Because Tonya had in the past hosted several virtual training sessions as well as online fitness programs, she had a good idea about how an eBook would be received by her clients. After putting out feelers in some of the program group chats and sessions, most of the feedback was around wanting training that they could follow on their own while keeping track of their weights and progress, and also to learn more about nutrition and how to how what they should be eating to get the most out of their workouts.
Building the Aesthetic
I started gathering inspiration for the design by perusing the assets that Tonya already had available—namely, her logos and website as well as any advertising material she had previously made to put on her instagram. From there, I compiled folders of different fonts, color samples, doodle art styles, and other training plan examples for Tonya to provide her initial opinions on. From there, narrowing down the selection and using what was left to begin drafting the eBook.
Over the course of the next 2 weeks, Tonya sent me manuscripts with text for the book while I created formats for different design styles. We went through several iterations of design and review; by providing Tonya with many options, she could point of which parts of each she liked for me to then incorporate into the next cycle. Below you can see the first round of designs, working around a handwritten font she really liked and using her signature peach logo:
The second round of designs focused more heavily on hand-drawn aspect of the previous round, adding more accents and doodles to give the book a fun and inviting feel. We changed out the title fonts for something more bold and modern to complement the new front cover:
And the final designs played off the previous “artistic” vibe, but swapped the doodles out for paint strokes and high quality photographs. We kept the accents pink and all other lines crisp and sharp for the sleek and simple design she was ultimately hoping for:
Because Tonya did not have any high quality photos to use herself, I went into the gym for a photoshoot so we could have a library to choose from. I ended up shooting all of the photos used in the eBook.
The Workbook
UX Design: Crafting the Fitness Journal
One of the main sections of her eBook was a breakdown of how to calculate macros for a daily diet. Because this section was so heavy with formulas and explanations, I suggested breaking the calculations out of the book and into a separate printable handout, formatted in a way that users could write in their values as they went. We ran with this idea and created an entire separate fitness journal to provide users with space for notes about their workouts along with the original macro calculations.
Creating the fitness journal was also a task of iteration. From the original pages of pure text, I broke down the process into small steps that were each numbered and given corresponding boxes for users to fill in. From there, the calculations needed to be rearranged to follow the flow from daily caloric intake to protein, carb, and fat breakdowns. Once the formatting was complete, I tested the design with several groups of people to see if following the worksheet would be intuitive and easy. After each round of feedback, I would make minor changes to the formatting until finally arriving at a product that my test users found simple and quick.
Below is a sample of the sheet used to calculate macros, original version to final from left to right:
