Baritchi | Branding agency

Friendly look for an extreme hobby

The theme for Stepdown Challenge Sinaia ‘09 was to celebrate the diversity and excellence of extreme sports enthusiasts from Romania. We’ve created a visual representation that would be immediately recognizable, appropriate for the competition and adaptable to a vast number of applications, including online exposure, print, advertising, signs, posters, banners etc.

RaidExtrem is the main distributor of Commencal and Saracen bikes in Romania and one of the local extreme sports promoters. This year they are organizing a new mountain-bike edition in Sinaia, Romania: Stepdown Challenge Sinaia ’09. The RaidExtrem Team wanted to create a powerful and positive national presence that would sustain both the competition and the competitors, extreme sports and Sinaia. Because of our long term partnership, Baritchi was invited by the organizers to help create the Stepdown Challenge theme, identity, and graphic elements for the 2009 Sinaia Edition.

The theme for Stepdown Challenge Sinaia ’09 was to celebrate the diversity and excellence of extreme sports enthusiasts from Romania. There were four concepts that needed to be united: culture, contrast, courage and fun times. These were to be the basis for the Stepdown Challenge this year visual identity. The graphic elements had to provide a unified, emotive, fun and memorable image. Baritchi’s task was to create this unique visual representation that would be immediately recognizable, appropriate for a mountain-bike competition and adaptable to a vast number of applications, including online exposure, print, advertising, signs, posters, banners etc.. The graphical representation would have to be enthusiastically embraced not only by RaidExtrem but by the local news media and especially by the city of Sinaia, as Sinaia City Hall Council is listed among the event main organizers.

The clean, colorful and suggestive graphic design symbolized the type of the competition and location and represented the four components of the theme. The symbols suggested free-riders in different steps of the competition and the funny exposure comes toward a better targeting of the event. The graphic concept also highlights the event main points of interest: location, competition type, difficulty degree. The bold, vivid colors expressed the courage of the competitors and a celebration of extreme sports ideals and sport as a fun, relaxing and healthy way of living.