As you probably know if you have been following this blog, our semester long design project has been based on a replacement facility for St. Anthony's hospital in the Lawndale neighborhood of Chicago. My partner (Luz Upegui) and I decided early on in the semester that we would design our replacement facility in a different location than that of the proposed site by HDR. We also decided to take a completely different approach to our design and proposed a mobile solution (stay tuned for our last blog post to see our final designs!). During this new site analysis and project design we noticed that we, as well as the rest of the class, started to loose touch with the entire basis of the project at hand: To design a replacement hospital...for ST. ANTHONY'S. In our past design studios we have always been designing something from scratch, something that was brand new, for a make believe client. We were starting to treat the project like it was a new hospital in the area instead of an already prominent place in the community that was just experiencing a little bit of a re-vamp. This is when we dialed ourselves back in and started to think about how we could bring St. Anthony's into our own design. Cue the re-branding!
We figured that as long as St. Anthony's was getting a new site, brand new facilities, and its own mobile healthcare based design it would need a new logo as well. This was also a great opportunity for us to work on the graphic design side of things, an area that neither one of us had ever really touched before. It started out as a simple task right? Ok, they need a new logo, maybe a few new colors? What we didn't realize was how much harder something like that actually is to conceive. A logo is designed with every stroke, every font, and every graphic in mind. There isn't anything that is displayed in that graphic that doesn't mean something to that company. So we couldn't just draw anything, first we had to do a little bit of research about branding as well as branding within the healthcare industry.
This is what brought us to find how rebranding is quite common in the healthcare world, and also just how important it is becoming. This semester we learned about how healthcare is becoming a more consumer based entity. With the attitudinal change of the generations switching and the adoption of the ACA as well as HIT system, individuals are able to shop around for healthcare. If you have an option of hospitals you are now able to go online, compare them, and make a conscious decision based on others experiences. So who all has undergone rebranding, and what are some things we should keep in mind as we begin to rebrand in our design?
Looking at an article online we were able to see healthcare companies that have been rebranded and how successful or not successful their rebranding strategies were. Take a look at CVS. In 2016.
They rebranded their pharmacy into CVS Health as an umbrella organization for their many healthcare services. This is a great example of how a company doesn't always have to do an entire rebuild of their original logo. This was something that was very interesting to me. When we started to rebrand we were trying to think of how to start a logo from scratch. After reading this article we realized that we didn't necessarily need to start from scratch. This is what prompted us to use the color purple for our logo. St. Anthony's color is a muted mauve-like purple color. We bolstered this up a little bit by brightening the color to a more bright purple. We felt like this brightened color fit more with the times as well as gave St. Anthony's a breath of fresh air without replacing their past.
Another logo that we learned from was the rebranding of the Catholic Healthcare West logo shown below.
This logo utilized the same star pattern that was in their original logo, but gave it a new age spin for their updated logo. This is another concept that we brought into our new St. Anthony's logo. We didn't want to change the logo completely because this hospital is a place that serves the community is resides in. These individuals trust its care and if we change the logo too much they might not think it is the same St. Anthony's they know and love. On the other hand our design does involve adding another type of mobile medical services and should be distinguished. This is what prompted our final iteration of design including half of St. Anthony's current logo with our new mobile aspect forming the other half. We are still tweaking things, so you will have to wait for the final post to see our newly proposed logo, but stay tuned because our studio is about to wrap up and our final designs will be announced!!!
For the article on successful vs. unsuccessful rebranding in healthcare go to...
http://www.ignytebrands.com/healthcare-rebranding-examples/
Photo Credit: http://www.ignytebrands.com/rebranding-in-healthcare/
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