Brand & Identity — 2024
Bright Harbor
A four-site health practice with a logo that worked on a business card and failed everywhere else.
A clinic identity that survived contact with fourteen sign types.
- Client
- Bright Harbor Family Health
- Discipline
- Identity design and wayfinding
- Engagement
- 14 weeks, May to Aug 2024
- Team
- Practice manager, sign fabricator, print supplier
Overview
Bright Harbor runs four family health clinics. Their identity had been designed for print in 2011 and had since been stretched across signage, vehicle livery, scrubs, appointment reminders and a patient portal, losing something at every step.
The brief was a refresh. The actual problem was that the identity had never been specified for anything beyond a letterhead, so every application had been improvised by whoever was closest.
Role
Brand and identity designer, contract
14 weeks, May to Aug 2024 · Practice manager, sign fabricator, print supplier
- Audit of every existing identity application across four sites
- Wordmark and symbol redraw, with a small-size variant
- Colour system specified for screen, coated print, uncoated print and vinyl
- Typographic system and the patient-facing document templates
- Wayfinding specification across fourteen sign types
- A 44-page guideline document written for non-designers
Problem
I photographed every identity application across the four clinics: 68 distinct items. The mark appeared in six different blues. The symbol became an unreadable smudge below about 18mm, which is exactly the size it was used at on staff badges and appointment cards.
Wayfinding was the sharpest failure. Patients arriving for a first appointment could not tell which entrance served which service, and reception staff were interrupted constantly by people who were simply lost. That is a design cost paid in someone's attention, every day.
Process
Photograph everything first
The audit of 68 applications did the persuading for me. Sixty-eight photographs on one wall makes the case for a system far better than an argument does, and it turned the conversation from taste into logistics.
Redrawing for the smallest use, not the largest
The symbol was redrawn from the badge size upward. It has a simplified variant that takes over below 20mm, with the threshold specified rather than left to judgement. Designing for the worst-case application makes every other one easy.
Colour specified per substrate
One brand blue, defined separately for screen, coated stock, uncoated stock and cut vinyl, with the tolerance for each. The six-blues problem was a specification failure, not a discipline failure.
Wayfinding designed against the patient journey
I walked the route from car park to consulting room at all four sites and marked every decision point. Fourteen sign types came out of that walk, each with a specified size, viewing distance, contrast ratio and mounting height.
Guidelines written for whoever is closest
The 44-page document is aimed at a practice manager ordering scrubs, not at a designer. It leads with the twelve things people get wrong, shows a correct and incorrect example for each, and keeps the theory at the back where it belongs.
Outcomes
- 14
- Sign types specified across four sites
- 6 → 1
- Brand blues in circulation
- 18mm
- Smallest legible mark, down from 34mm
- 44 pp
- Guidelines written for non-designers
The practice manager told me six months later that nobody had asked her which blue to use since the rollout. That is the whole point of a specification.
Gallery
Tools
- Illustrator
- InDesign
- Figma
- Pantone Connect
