QUAD is a brand for running on all fours. It started with a recurring dream and a night on Hampstead Heath, and became an experiment in how branding can make the strange feel normal.
- Client
- Self-initiated
- Role
- Brand strategy, identity, campaign, copywriting
- Year
- 2025
- Tools
- Fresco, Illustrator, Photoshop, Firefly
The story
The dream
I kept having these dreams. Someone, always some kind of authority figure, would be chasing me through the streets where I lived, but I was never scared. I’d run effortlessly, ducking round corners and leaping fences, treating the chase like a game. As I ran I’d feel compelled to lean forward and grasp the ground with my hands. I’d pull as I bounded, now on all fours, faster and lighter, faster and lighter, until my feet no longer needed to touch the floor…. I’d leap with ease onto bus stop roofs, lamp posts, walls and balconies, something like a wolf, a bird and a chimpanzee. Everyone around me, my pursuers included, would be dumbfounded. They only ever grew more angry and confused, not because I was defying gravity, but because I was defying them. Because I was so fearless.
Like a paper aeroplane that catches itself by the speed of its own descent, I’d begin to fly, swimming through the air over people’s heads, never to touch the ground again.
The dreams came so often, and felt so real, that at the moment I became weightless I’d think, “I knew it! I’m really doing it! Just like I dreamed!” Then I’d wake up.
Like a paper aeroplane that catches itself by the speed of its own descent.
The canal
One of the places these dreams were set is a very specific spot on my regular running route: a long, gentle bend where the trees overhang the canal. Whenever I reached it, I felt an overwhelming urge to drop down and pull myself forward with my hands. To run on all fours. I knew I wouldn’t fly, but I needed to know what it felt like to truly free-run. To run as a form of play.
The problem is, if you start running on all fours in public, people get scared. They might call the police. And this is the UK; we have polite society. I might get kicked, or at least shouted at. I’d have to do it in a park in the middle of the night, which you’re not really allowed to do in London, and the few parks where you can are known for nefarious things, if not outright danger.
The heath
In the end, it found me. I was at a secret gig on Hampstead Heath with a few friends, wandered off for a piss, and suddenly found myself on a wide grassy knoll, far from anyone who might see me. Exactly where I wanted to be. This might be my only chance. So I did it.
I ran. Hands and feet. Arms and legs. Torso and hips. You don’t run like a wolf, or fly like a bird, but you do bound and play and roll and flip and jump and bounce like a chimpanzee. It is so much bloody fun, and an incredible full-body workout. I can’t tell you how good it feels, or how utterly exhausting it is. I felt it in every muscle, everything moving together in free-flowing, natural forms, the burn and buzz in my arms and core. Within a minute I’d collapsed, starfished on the grass, covered in sweat and laughing with pure, ecstatic joy.
There’s something deeply freeing and deeply natural about bounding prone. You embrace the beast within by embracing the child. It’s quite literally grounding.
I rested for a few minutes, then rolled over and did it again, and again, bounding and grinning like an idiot in the dark of the treeline in the middle of the night.
Embrace the beast within by embracing the child.
The problem
So I’d discovered this thing. This playform. This sport. It’s simple, accessible, and might be the best exercise I’ve ever tried. It’s liberating to the point of beauty, and you need nothing but the freedom to play in an open, comfy space. It’s powerfully expressive. It’s a one-man mosh pit. It might be what the world needs.
But you can’t do it. Bounding down the canal in broad daylight, or even across an empty corner of the park, while everyone else enjoys their regular human walks and runs, would be a bizarre spectacle.
So what would it take to normalise it?
The brief
01 — A name
Free running already belongs to parkour, and Four Point sounded like a seatbelt. QUAD won because it works as a noun, a verb and a crew, which is how you know a sport has a culture and not just a rulebook. Four limbs, one word. Short enough to shout across a park, plain enough to sound like it’s always existed.
- Four Point
- Free Running
- QUAD
- “Do you quad, bro?”
- “I met this guy. He quads.”
- “Come join our quad on the Heath.”
- “Quadding is so dope.”
- “Yeah, I quadded into the office.”
And once people are asking “do you quad?”, the campaign line writes itself.
02 — A face
- Mint
#00ffaf - Violet
#6500fe - Magenta
#ff00b6 - Orange
#fc8f01 - Black
#000000 - White
#ffffff
The mark is a body in play, an infinity with arms, flying through the air, humanist and organic: a way of life, not just a sport. The wordmark does the opposite job: geometric, engineered, a little rigid. It’s the part that says “this is a real sport”. Together they hold the tension the brand lives in, between the beast and the professional.
03 — A voice
DO YOU. Half question, half permission. Hand-painted, because the whole sport is made with your hands.
04 — An identity
Every real sport has kit. QUAD’s is mostly gloves, goggles and confidence. The more serious the gear looks, the less silly the sport does.
What’s next
A following. First, a pair of short films: a staged public confrontation, and some footage of a blurry man-beast running on all fours in the woods. Then the first official QUAD session on the Heath. Kit on, gloves down…
