Seattle and Raleigh-Durham marketing, graphic and brand design studio Design Kompany

A new brand is more than just a fancy logotype. It’s the whole feeling you get when you see something new.

Design Kompany came up with this brand identity for a new Seattle organization called Healthcare Vouchers:

And here’s what we shared in the context of a mockup ad, before we had any copy written. We like to give people some context when they’re trying to decide if a certain “look and feel” works.

The mockup:

The design idea here was to simplify. The message. The feeling. Boil down the big idea, and keep things neat and simple.

Design Kompany was happy to hear that when this mockup ad we made was flown to Washington, D.C., and shown to Dr. Ezekiel Emmanuel, the academic researcher who came up with the healthcare vouchers idea, he liked it enough to ask to keep a copy.

Interestingly, the book he wrote and later published he titled simply, “Healthcare, Guaranteed.”

Some of the comments we got from the team that approved the new look:

• Love it.
• I really like the freshness of it.
• Most health care stuff is too somber, serious, wonkie, depressing or obvious drug company marketing hype.

Design Kompany’s method

So how did we approach the branding of a concept?

By starting at the beginning.

It’s easier to tackle something hard by breaking it into bite-sized chunks.

So first, we talked to Healthcare Vouchers about how to frame a piece of their brand message story.

Once the bounds were defined, Design Kompany could package visuals.

What we’re best at is drawing out from our clients through interviews and careful listening exactly what the heart of their brand message needs to be.

For Healthcare Vouchers, it was this:

This is a fair, accessible way to guarantee basic healthcare for every American.

The facts: Healthcare Vouchers is a new Seattle-based organization working to introduce healthcare vouchers to presidential candidates. The organization needed a logo and a tag line to convey the idea to a general audience.

Design Kompany suggested the name MyVoucher to make it easy to talk about the one-for-each-American healthcare plan concept.

Of course, talking about this idea, which takes some explaining, isn’t easy to do quickly and simply.

You really have to know what you’re trying to convey—what you want your audience to feel—before putting pencil to paper or picking the words you’re going to use to describe a complicated-at-first-sight kind of idea.

Talk about brand messaging!

And you have to be especially clear and focused when you talk about an idea if you want to rally public support around it.

Our first task was to come up with a way to get Healthcare Vouchers to rally support around our idea.

That’s why we decided to present our brand design in the form of a mockup ad. Once you see it in context, it’s easier to “get.” So we set up a page with 1) our suggestion for the name MyVoucher 2) the tagline “I’m Covered,” 3) the imagery we drew and 4) some lorem ipsum text to hold the place of what’s yet-to-be written.

MyVoucher launches website

UPDATE: December 2007

MyVoucher is looking for help with getting the word out about the initiative for healthcare reform. If you’re interested in getting on their newsletter mailing list or making a contribution, visit HealthcareVouchers.org

UPDATE: May 2008

This month the Healthcare Guaranteed team announced one major step forward in their quest to spread the word about the universal healthcare coverage idea.

In an article called How to cure America’s health system in Financial Times, writer Clive Crook says this about Dr. Ezekiel Emmanuel’s idea:

Standards of care for those with access are superb, but the price is stunning. The US spends 16 per cent of its gross domestic product on health. Most of that is private, but even what the government spends exceeds, in per capita dollars, all Britain’s outlays (National Health Service and private spending combined). Yet aggregate US health outcomes are poor. By no stretch of the imagination does the US system deliver value for money.

But how to fix it?

The best of recent books on this question is happily the shortest and clearest and comes out this month. I think it has the answer. The proposal laid out in Healthcare, Guaranteed (Public Affairs, $14.95) by Ezekiel Emanuel (an oncologist, bioethicist and noted health policy scholar) has convinced me. Whether it will convince others is in doubt for reasons I will come to. But if you are going to read one book on the subject, make it Mr Emanuel’s. —Read full article by Clive Crook :How to cure America’s health system in Financial Times