Thistle case study
Thistle is a modern home workout app built to help busy people stay consistent with their fitness through guided programmes, community accountability, and progress tracking, creating a supportive experience that keeps users motivated and committed to their goals.
Adobe Illustrator
Adobe Photoshop
Notion
Logo
Wordmark
Thistle is a home workout app designed to make exercise more accessible for busy people. It focuses on encouraging people to stay active through small programmes, progress tracking, and accountability with their friends.
The founder already had the app built but needed a logo before launch.
My task was to create an identity that felt modern, motivating, and recognisable while clearly reflecting the Scottish thistle the brand was named after. The logo also needed to work at small sizes, across social media, and future brand applications as the brand grows.
Instead of going straight into logo concepts, I gave my client a questionnaire to get to know everything about their company, their target audience, their future goals, how they wanted the brand to be seen etc. This gave me a better information on where it is now, and where they want it to go in the future.
I was then able to start creating moodboards and exploring possible visual directions so the founder could see the overall direction and personality of the brand before moving into the final design, so that we were on the same page. After I created the moodboards I wrote reasonings behind my choices linked to the founders information from the questionnaire.
After the founder reviewed each direction and read the reasonings, Moodboard 1 was selected.
With the visual direction agreed, I began sketching logo concepts.
The goal was to simplify the shape of the Scottish thistle into a recognisable mark that would remain clear even at app icon size. In this stage, I explored different ways of intertwining the thistle with the subtle fitness symbolism of a kettlebell to represent strength and fitness.
Every concept was designed with scalability and long-term flexibility in mind.
The first concept
Feedback on first concept
The client's only feedback was that they felt that the kettlebell shape suggested a traditional gym rather than home workouts. The client also wanted purple to be incorporated into the logo, so that it still emphasise the thistle.
Feedback on first concept
After reviewing the refined concept, the client decided to return to the original design, with purple included. The first kettlebell concept had grown on them, and the client felt it provided greater flexibility should the brand expand into equipment-based or gym workouts in the future.
The final result
Client Testimonial
"I can't recommend Edona enough. She brought my vision to life perfectly, with a clean, professional design that captures exactly what I was looking for. She has great communication skills and is very responsive, which made the whole process smooth and easy.
I'm absolutely delighted and would recommend Edona to anyone in need of quality design work."
Agron Elshani
Founder @ Thistle Fit
