Golf Guru
A golf psychology coach that lives in your pocket — brand, product, and design system built as one continuous piece of work.
Golf is played on a six-inch course: the space between your ears. Golf Guru packages sports psychology into audio sessions, mental-game scoring, and pre-round routines for everyday golfers. The work covered the whole surface — a brand that could sit calmly next to the game's old institutions, and an app that makes working on your head feel as normal as working on your swing.
This wasn't a client brief — Golf Guru was a startup, joined at the start as founding designer. The seat stretched to acting head of product and into the front-end code, and along the way the company scaled to thousands of users and raised a substantial pre-seed.
THE BRAND
The identity starts with the levitating guru: a meditating figure crossed with golf clubs, floating above the ring of a cup. Guru Green does the heavy lifting, supported by Lake Ball teal, Sand Trap cream, and the near-black Twilight 9th — a palette pulled from dusk on a links course rather than a leaderboard. The voice keeps the same calm confidence; the out-of-home line simply says, "It's not your swing."
THE APP
The product organizes a golfer's week around a practice wheel — Prepare, Practice, Play, Pre-Round, Post-Round — with audio sessions from the guru, reflections, and a mental-game score tracked round over round. A full design system carries it: golden-ratio type scale, dials and score charts, call-out cards, and the tracking components that turn soft psychology into hard numbers.
THE REBUILD
In 2026 the app was rebuilt as a working React prototype for this portfolio — three complete flows running in a phone frame you can actually use. The tile in this case study isn't a mockup; it's the product, live. Scroll the wheel, play a session, score a round.