First of all, Happy Independence Day! Hope you’re having a happy and healthy summer 🌴

This month, we designed four “Cycle Syncing Hot Dog” recipes and shared them on our social media channels — as well as within our App. It suddenly felt appropriate to go deeper into why we’re spending time doing this kind of stuff. Our mission is to spread cycle knowledge without overwhelming. We’ve been studying the menstrual cycle and along with our advisors (we’ll be posting about them next month!), we’ve been working on figuring out non-intrusive ways to easily impart approachable and practical bits of valuable and memorable knowledge. Given the high level of general misinformation and the amount of online clutter surrounding “women wellness”, this is a huge challenge.

We know that first we simply need to create more awareness around the fact that there’s more to our cycle than our period — in case this is your first exposure, there are four equally important phases 😯 Once we shut down the clutter we can start properly leveraging our graphic mnemonic devices to spread some responsible wisdom on how to stay more in sync with our bodies. We’re looking for people who will trust us not only with tracking their cycle but are also interested in listening to our advice and believing that it’s the best possible personalized set of wellness knowledge they can find. By designing our first series of very simple four-ingredient “cycle dogs” (based on each of the four phases of our cycle) we’re hoping to start doing this in the fun and inclusive way we’ve promised.

Enjoy our recipes and a very simplified explanation of each phase below.

The “Winter” Dog

Remember this is a period of high intuition. You might feel like meditating or journaling. It’s best to focus on warm energy foods.

Ingredients:

Buckwheat Bread

Pork Kielbasa Links

Soy-Glazed Shiitake Mushrooms

Sunny-Side Up Egg, optional

Instructions:

Eat up!

The “Spring” Dog

This phase is great for new ideas and fresh, colorful foods.

Ingredients:

Rye Bread

Sweet Apple Chicken Sausage

Pickled Carrots & Zucchini

Lemon Avocado Dressing

Instructions:

Eat up!

The “Summer” Dog

It’s a perfect week for connecting with your community. You’ll be filled with rich positive energy and should focus on like-feeling foods. Summer produce is a must.

Ingredients:

Corn Bread

Lamb Merguez

Tossed Red Bell Peppers, Tomato & Scallions

Fig Spread or Ketchup! — most ideal in this phase.

Instructions:

Eat up!

The “Fall” Dog

It’s great to have healthy ingredients on hand to prepare for cravings. This dog will be an amazingly indulgent but great treat.

Ingredients:

Millet Bread

Beef Bratwurst

Garlic tossed Chickpeas & Onions

Mustard & Sweet Potato Fries — most ideal in this phase.

Instructions:

Eat up!

Thanks for reading. Be sure to download our App to learn more.

The meaning behind some of the graphic selections for the Period Gold app.

We’re proud to say that we’re simple and we focus on the bright side. Our main goal was to create a fun, straightforward space for becoming more curious about our cycles. So even though we craved for the interface to be clean, minimalistic and editorial, we also wanted for it to have tons of cultural personality. For us, that meant cool iconography. As designers, we rarely talk about the symbolism behind the small but meaningful details we select each day as graphic representations for our projects. Sometimes we select them intentionally, other times we don’t — regardless, all icons are tied to important symbolic meanings. We’re here to talk about the ones behind the key graphic players within our product.

Did you know that the traditional smiley face was designed by American commercial artist Harvey Ball to boost employee morale? He made it for an insurance company, which paid him around $50 for the gig. We’ve loved it since Forrest Gump, and every moment before and after emojis. We’d already selected the brand color to be a shade of egg yolk yellow that seemed to be a perfect match with the iconic figure. A smiley face look-alike was a no brainer for us to represent the type of feeling we wanted to evoke in our users when heading to their profiles.

During our brainstorming sessions, mushrooms kept coming up. They felt like such an appealing creature — we simply couldn’t let them go. Turns out that in nature, mushrooms are known to be extremely quick to develop and cyclically grow. They recycle, transform and soak in the ground. They recreate fertile soil. They’re famous for their heads being a symbol of the potent force of nature. They have been used for food, medicine and spiritual practices for thousands of years. So when we had the insight of making “high energy” one of the highlight features of our app, we inevitably thought of the mushroom as the perfect symbol for overall wellness and the power of owning our individual hormonal changes and energy bursts.

Our first clear discovery was that period talk is still a huge taboo. We thought that part of breaking this taboo would be tactful mockery. One of those ice breakers would be owning “shark week” as a positive. The emoji shark representation seemed to be at the perfect angle and semi-circle position to fit our loader needs. It came to us easily and seamlessly bringing in a quick hint of sarcasm to the experience. We then went down a spiral of reading about sharks and it turns out that during the menstrual phase, our spirit animal might as well be one! Sharks are intuitive, instinctive creatures that roam the depths of their environment. Similar to how we mystify in our own depths during our menstrual week — whether we realize it or not. We’re forced to look inside ourselves. They also symbolize moving forward and the fierce feeling of taking weaknesses and turning them into strength.

Curious to learn more about our process? Send us a message with more ideas about what you’d like to know: hello@periodgold.com