Jake Pates is the coolest 21 year old we know. Olympic Snowboarder, nonprofit founder, Brain Health Activist, and Oblique Client. Born and raised in Eagle, Colorado, Jake began snowboarding as a little kid. By 8 years old, he was with USASA, which gave him the opportunity to create a career for himself in professional snowboarding. Over the past 14 years, Jake has had multiple concussions; and as a result, has suffered with anxiety and depression.

One of the main goals in Jake’s life, so far, is to figure out a way to prevent this from happening to other people. Thus, the mission of Jake’s foundation, Happy Healthy Brain Foundation was born. The Happy Health Brain Foundations aims is to share advances in technological products that provide objective information and therapeutic solutions for enhancing brain health, safety and performance. That’s why Jake partnered with technology companies such as WAVi Medical and BrainTap. These two companies created hi-end technological brain devices that can be used to improve concussion protocols for snowboarding and skiing, and much more. The current protocols rely on standard clinical and performance measures to determine when an athlete can safely return to play. What Jake’s initiative wants to do is move current concussion protocols away from solely relying on subjective information and towards including objective information obtained by technology.

Wavi Medical is a portable brain scanning device that establishes a baseline wave scan for a healthy athlete’s brain so that if an injury should occur during the season another brain scan can be done to measure the brain post injury. Subsequent scans can be performed to ensure that the athlete’s brain can return to baseline before she/he gets back out on the field or onto his/her board.

The second company the Happy Healthy Brain Foundation has partnered with is BrainTap. It produces an audio-visual entrainment technology to calm and destress the brain. Janice, the founder of Oblique, currently uses this device. She is an athlete who also has suffered from many concussions from mountain biking. Janice claims that after using BrainTap for over a month, her concentration, focus and sleep have greatly improved. BrainTap also has a profound impact on visualization techniques, focus, anxiety and depression.

When the Happy Healthy Brain Foundation came to Oblique to help with redesigning their logo and website, it was, forgive the pun, a no-brainer. This was, for Janice, a true passion project. Combining a cause that directly affects her, working with a super cool Olympian and her love of design and branding … obviously this partnership was a perfect fit. Oblique was beyond excited to create a simple website design, write creative copy and implement an entire branding overhaul.

Happy Healthy Brain Foundation’s new logo resembles an abstract relatable person with uncertainty and anxiety searching for a solution. The logo was intentionally designed to express hope and a solution in healing their brain. The redesign of their website followed suit. The Oblique team took a minimalistic, simplistic and clean approach. Utilizing the white space of the page, bold type face and eye catching photography, our messaging in the copy is direct and powerful. Including first-hand experiences from people like Peter Seamans (founder of Crocs), the testimonials speak for themselves. Reexamining concussion protocol is a fairly new pursuit. Over the past 15 or so years, we’ve just begun to scratch the surface of the implications of repeated brain injuries. We have so much to learn still. But, after working with young people like Jake Pates, there is hope for a better future. It is an amazing feeling to know that Oblique has contributed in its own way to an organization that is out to positively impact the world.

If you would like to learn more about Jake Pates’s foundation, check them out here!

And if you’d also like to learn more about the technology HHBF advocates for, check out WAVi & BrainTap: