Mobility innovator AZAK is giving wheels an upgrade – placing all of the vehicle drive components inside the wheel which saves space and weight while enabling faster, broader adoption of electric vehicles (EVs). As the company looked to fully communicate the breadth and scope of its transformative vision, it partnered with creative studio High Tide for a new identity designed to embody their mission of driving mobility forward by letting people do more with less.

AZAK’s wheel technology offers an EV solution for sectors that need to operate in the toughest terrain and need to save space and weight. They do this by removing all the parts and constraints that are inherent with the “skateboard” model – a self-contained platform common to the EV space – and placing those components in the wheel itself. Not only does this give it a lower center of gravity, it makes the wheels easier to repair and flexible, with the ability to swap wheels (i.e. batteries) resulting in zero down time. These critical changes make EVs more adaptable to a wider variety of industries and uses.

High Tide needed to craft branding with a touch of intrigue that conveyed the entirely new possibilities enabled by the technology. Beyond positioning this mobility system for an audience of engineers, they also wanted to build a brand that could be able to speak to a general audience. “AZAK is special in that it has a very real opportunity to shift culture,” explains High Tide’s Founder and Creative Director, Danny Miller. “With its revolutionary and innovative technology, we wanted their pioneering mindset to be reflected in the identity. Our goal was to show AZAK’s game changing potential for a lot of existing fields and sectors.” The studio also wanted to avoid leaning into any common tropes in the tire, mobility or automotive brands, instead taking cues and inspiration from high-performance outdoor equipment brands and high-end technological design companies.

For both the wordmark and icon, High Tide redesigned AZAK with a very high-tech feel – with sharp and precise corners that reflect the angular and technical look of their products. The wordmark is also intentionally wide and extended with low crossbars in the lettering to allude to AZAK’s proprietary low center of gravity technology. The brand icon consists of several distinct parts that highlight what makes AZAK’s mobility system unique, all inside one icon. For example, it embraces the radial symmetry of the wheel while visually signaling its design principles – with a modularity that acts as a nod to the tread on a tire and a symbol of the drive components positioned on the bottom half of the wheel. It even has an “A” hidden inside the design itself.

Diagrammatic illustrations used throughout the identity further help people clearly understand the AZAK product, feeling both technical yet accessible. Similarly, tactile product images spotlight AZAK’s obsession with only using the highest grade materials for their product and attention to detail around all of their tooled components. High Tide partnered with Palam Digital to create these very compelling and high-definition product renders that help showcase all the beauty, detail and optimization that goes into the AZAK wheel and product components.
“It’s not often that you get to create a brand for a company as truly revolutionary as AZAK,” adds Miller. “In building excitement and understanding, we knew that we needed to make sure that it was immediately clear that this is not a new type of wheel or even just a tire. This is a movement looking to empower everyone to achieve so much more. With this new identity, our team has captured the precision and ruggedness the system is built for, with sleek and inspiring technology that we hope will enable a bright future.”