The world is the game: rebranding INTVL and rebuilding its app
Every product tells a story about what it believes. INTVL believed movement should have consequence, but its brand and its app still spoke the language of fitness tracking. We rebuilt both, so the idea at the heart of the product finally showed up on every screen.
The challenge
INTVL launched as an interval-training app. By the time the project began, it had become something far more ambitious: a movement-gaming platform that turns real-world running and cycling into competitive, territory-based play. Think Zwift meets Pokémon Go, not a fitness tracker.
The product had moved on. The brand and the interface had not. The identity and app still read like fitness software, and the game layer felt bolted on rather than built in. One hard constraint framed everything: keep the INTVL name. It carried real equity, even though it was named for a product that no longer existed.
A new idea for the brand
We rebuilt the strategy from the ground up, mining category truths, competitive advantage, and shared beliefs from real evidence. It converged on a single line: the world is the game. From there the direction was clear. The vision: to give movement consequence. The mission: to turn everyday movement into a competitive, real-world game.
The sharpest move was the one we chose not to make. Rather than replace a name that no longer fit, we changed what it meant, recontextualising INTVL from training jargon into the distance between you and your rival. The equity stayed intact. The meaning caught up with the product.
An identity built for provocation
Most fitness brands are designed to motivate. We designed INTVL to provoke, and that shift runs through every decision. The category defaults to the coach; we chose the rival. That single reframe let us discard the conventions the category leans on: the aspirational photography, the encouraging palette, the soft rounded type.
Every brand value translated directly into design. A radical shift in colour gave the product a functional, gamified interface language rather than a decorative fitness palette. The logo device, the interval, runs throughout the system. Typography carries the brand’s central tension, pairing ABC Favorit Ultra Condensed Italic for provocation with the disciplined, code-like precision of Geist for everything functional. The imagery rejected category convention wholesale: pre-dawn streets and people mid-move, not golden hour and posed athletes.
Moving the game into the moment
With the brand in place, we redesigned the core app experience so the interface stopped describing the game and started delivering it.
The run screen now surfaces live territory capture as the primary view, not a statistic buried in a post-run summary. We integrated Terra, the game layer, natively rather than loading it as a separate screen. Post-run, a dedicated summary screen frames the run around gain and loss, echoing the brand’s “leave a mark” idea directly in the interface.
The identity carries straight into functional UI. The HUD-style frame device and monospaced numerals mean the game state reads instantly, at a glance, at speed, mid-run, one-handed, outdoors. The decisions are deliberately restrained rather than decorative, because legibility in the moment is the whole point.
The Outcome
The redesign did more than look the part. Post-launch, the large majority of users rated navigation as easy, and the new summary screen landed just as well. Most telling was the behaviour it drove: users named the live territory-capture view as the reason they run new routes at all.
That is the real result. The interface is not simply legible, it actively drives the core loop the product depends on. Strategy, identity, and product now tell one story, and the world is the game on every screen.
