Here’s What I Learned Working on the Gooddaze Brand
Gooddaze is a CBD gummy company built around calm, uniqueness, and organic care. From the first conversation with the founders, it was clear this wasn’t going to be a typical wellness brand project, they wanted the identity itself to feel like the product’s effect: grounded, a little unexpected, and genuinely calming.
The challenge
CBD brands live in a crowded, often visually repetitive space. A lot of them lean on the same handful of cues: muted greens, leaf icons, minimalist sans-serif type. That can read as safe, but it also makes it nearly impossible to stand out on a shelf or a screen. Gooddaze needed a way to signal “calm and trustworthy” without falling into the same visual language as everyone else in the category.
The approach
We started with strategy sessions built entirely around three core values: calmness, uniqueness, and organic essence. Every design decision after that had to serve at least one of those.
The visual identity is anchored by a sunburst logo, subtly built around the letter G, that radiates a sense of serenity while still being distinct enough to live on its own, separate from the full logotype. I paired it with a custom, organic-inspired typeface to reinforce that same sense of warmth and individuality. For color, I chose a palette of lilac and orange, an unconventional combination for the category that reads as both original and warm rather than clinical or overly earthy. Typography throughout the rest of the system stayed sleek with just enough personality to support the logo without competing with it.
What I learned
The biggest takeaway from Gooddaze: letting the name do the work is often the most underused strategy in branding. Once we locked into the sunburst concept tied to the letter G, so much of the rest of the system followed naturally, the color palette, the typeface direction, even the packaging pattern language all extended from that one central idea instead of being invented separately.
If you’re building a brand in a saturated category, it’s worth asking early: is there something baked into the name itself, a shape, a sound, a association, that can become the anchor for the whole visual system instead of starting from a blank page?
