OVERVIEW
Glare is a longboard skateboarding brand for the urban commuter. Its boards feature the Uplight–a safety system that increases nighttime visibility without blinding drivers.
TEAM
André Orta, Eugenia Ramos, Qixuan Wang, Micah Lynn
TIMELINE
3 months
MY CONTRIBUTION
Branding, product ideation, research, presentation narrative
CONTEXT
MFA Products of Design, School of Visual Arts
Longboarding is a subset of skateboarding, where longer, lower boards with better grip and maneuverability have been used to cruise beach boardwalks and carve mountain roads. But longboarding has two major problems:
1: It’s dangerous on open roads.
2: Its core user is overwhelmingly white, male, and suburban.
We developed the Uplight to help prevent car-related accidents at night, a problem currently injuring over 129,000 people in the US each year.
Glare's branding communicates a new context for longboarding: one that's city-based instead of beachside and inclusive instead of niche. The brand is more serious than its west-coast counterparts, and reflects its urban mobility focus with an exciting, moody, mysterious quality.
The Uplight, a unique Glare technology, is a long-wavelength, board-mounted beam of light projecting upward onto riders, increasing nighttime visibility and reducing the risk of car collisions.
The market for commuting to work in cities via micro mobile vehicles is growing fast. Longboarding can play a major role in this new market, but safety remains a worsening issue that must be addressed.
I spoke with longboard enthusiasts to understand their wants, needs, and habits.
Commuting on foot or with bikes and scooters is on the rise. At the same time, pedestrian injuries are increasing fastest in cities at night. This tells us there is an unmet need for night time safety features for pedestrians in cities.
Based on our conversations with users, there are 3 moments that safety equipment intervenes in an accident. We chose to focus upstream on accident deterrents in the pre-accident phase.
“How might we reduce the risk of injury
among urban longboarders at night?”
As a group, we ideated on possible solutions to our problem and sketched them in order to discuss them.
We fabricated a working prototype of our Uplight board and tested it on city streets at night.
After iterating on our proof of concept, we created a final iteration of the Uplight-equipped longboard.
I researched 4 major longboarding brands to understand their visual branding and tone and learn how Glare might set itself apart.
I created one mood board inspired by the standard industry aesthetic, and another
around the Glare aesthetic.
According to, stakeholders have invested over $5.7 billion in micromobility startups since 2015, and the market is currently growing at 2-3x the rate of either car sharing or ride hailing.
Longboarding, both human-powered and electric, represents a fun, portable, hands-free micromobility solution that can occupy a unique whitespace in this growing market.
