For 20 years - in fact longer than I’ve been an industrial designer - I’ve been working with Jost Sauer. Jost is an acupuncturist and a pioneer in the health lifestyle field. He lectured in traditional Chinese medicine for ten years and is an expert on its understanding of lifestyle medicine. As a therapist and founder of many busy health clinics, he knows that most people want to improve their health but don’t know how. So he created the Chi Cycle lifestyle which takes care of physical, emotional and spiritual health. While he’s a popular motivational speaker and author of many engaging books, he also practises what he preaches, and is the most unusual, uplifting, radically optimistic person you’ll ever meet.
Industrial designer
Concept + vision designer
Graphic designer
Web designer
Illustrator
Videographer
Video editor
Photographer
Writer
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Marketer
The Chi Cycle is both the doorway to - and the foundation of health. Your energy, or chi, spends two hours in each of your organs every day. What you do during each of these 2 hours either builds up your energy and your health, happiness and success, or depletes your energy which leads to ill-health and misery.
The Chi Cycle opens the door to physical change but is also at the foundation of health and happiness.
While this is a relatively simple concept, it has been a complex journey over the years to communicate. The below video sums up the power of the Chi Cycle.
Spending hours looking at your phone, skipping meals, eating while working, and never ‘switching off’ chews up your life energy and opens the door to the ‘lifestyle diseases’.
The answer to the modern health meltdown is lifestyle medicine.
Lifestyle medicine is a new concept in western medicine, but it has been a key part of traditional Chinese medicine for thousands of years. This is the oldest medicine on earth, it has millennia of proven results and it is truly holistic.
I designed this crest brand to sum up the primary elements of lifestyle medicine: exercise + martial arts, herbs + nutrition, energy, and mindfulness.
The secrets to life are in your organs. They are your personal and highly trustworthy internal health team. They work 24/7 to keep you healthy and happy.
They like routine, nutritious food, quality sleep and purposeful lives, and they follow the 24 hour rhythm of health.
For Jost’s fifth book ‘Clock On To Health’ - he decided to reimagine the organs as individual characters with different personalities, depending on what they do for you. In traditional Chinese medicine the heart is known as the emperor (a strong heart means a strong mind, good memory and balanced emotions) and the liver is known as the general (a healthy liver provides resoluteness and drive, and the capacity to plan your life). But the other 10 organs needed names and character development. So I designed and illustrated the organ team, based on their characteristics and role in the Chi Cycle.
While I’ve been through many iterations of Jost’s personal branding, lifestyle medicine branding, and Chi Cycle branding, there have been several spin offs, programs and ideas that needed visualising (usually in a very short period of time).
A work in progress, the Health Yourself app takes the 24 hour chi cycle and breaks it into its simplest elements: drive, cruise, and snooze. These 8 hour blocks are critical to internal and external health and wellbeing. Drive builds momentum, cruise takes advantage of that momentum, and snooze helps you to wind down and prepare to drive again.
The concept behind the app is tips, tricks, and reminders on how to follow the Chi Cycle, as well as an ability to log progress and make it your own.
If we want to save the world, we have to save the one that’s within first.
I’ve been Jost’s photographer for many years. I also graphically format his social media posts, and create videos, teasers, and marketing materials.