Role: Creative Director

Company: Advantia Health

Teams: Creative & Marketing (7), Executive Leadership (6), Tech/Development (2), Operations (8), Clinical (12), Architecture Partner (4)

Project: Branding, User Experience, Website Design, Print & Digital Advertising, Interior Design, Signage, POS, Photoshoot Styling and Direction

In addition to establishing a harmonious parent brand to unify our inherited portfolio of medical practices, we designed the new Advantia Health brand to stand out as a trailblazer in the industry.  We carefully crafted an identity that would be versatile enough to support the future development of innovation products and experiences across digital, tech, brick & mortar, and future acquisitions, while maintaining brand recognition across channels. 

The most immediate and significant test of the brand’s versatility and fortitude arose in the design, development, and implementation of our first flagship location, Liv by Advantia Health.  Ambitious in concept and scope, Liv’s mission is to make healthcare more convenient and comfortable by providing obstetrics, gynecology, primary care, and mental wellness, all under one roof, ergonomically designed with hospitality in mind. We were designing an entirely new care model and user experience, building a luxury brick-and-mortar space from the ground up, and crafting a brand voice and vision that could sell this proof of concept into fruition through ambitious membership targets before our doors opened.

Liv opened March 2021, hitting 130% of our member acquisition targets and growing social media engagement by 200% in 3 weeks. We proudly maintain an NPS of 97, considered world-class in our industry.

Brand discovery and refinement

Liv’s mission to serve as an innovation hub in women’s health presented a unique opportunity to demonstrate how the Advantia brand could be curated to appeal to niche audiences in specialized use cases.  The design considerations in developing Liv as both a standalone brand experience meriting an annual membership fee and as a flagship representation of Advantia Health as parent company, were many:

  • What’s in a name? We conducted exhaustive namescaping exercises, consumer research, and focus groups to devise a unique brand name that our consumers found approachable, memorable, and relatable. Liv serves as both a descriptive pun alluding to its mission to empower women to “Live Well,” and a memorable personification of the brand as an individual.

  • What’s the relation? The “By Advantia Health” subheading signifies Liv as an original intellectual concept created by our parent brand, whereas our acquired entities adopt “Of Advantia Health.” The logo lockup’s palette and typographic conventions place it harmoniously within the broader Advantia portfolio, maintaining Advantia’s logo mark as the top level identifier of the Advantia Health brand.

  • Where does Liv…live? Our team ran extensive pregnancy prediction and consumer behavior models to determine where our key audiences lived, worked, and spent their free time. We surveyed prospective patients on where they would ideally house all their healthcare needs in relation to the spaces they frequented and the decisions they made throughout their day-to-day lives. We ultimately selected a ground level retail space on U Street Corridor in downtown DC - a bustling intersection of commerce, professional, and residential real estate - providing a convenient haven for our members to seek comfortable care without trekking across town or state borders.

  • How does Liv speak? Liv’s voice is approachable, upbeat, calm and confident. Our main goal is to put our members at ease and leave them with a positive and personalized experience. Most of the time we maintain an informal and casual tone, but this varies depending on the situation. We let our members’ mood be the guide for crafting our tone. 

    • Liv’s voice is honest, but not harsh. Expert, but not over-the-head. Intelligent, but not pretentious. Calm, but not disinterested. Friendly, but not unpolished. Intentional, but not short. Liv is the friend you admire, the mentor you respect, the woman you can always turn to when you need advice. 

Bringing Liv to life

While the Advantia parent brand was designed to appeal to a patient population of 430K+ women across 60+ locations nationwide, spanning a wide range of age, income, and lifestyle demographics, Liv is a membership-based, hospitality-focused patient experience designed to speak specifically to the preferences and sensibilities of a DMV-based patient population.  In honing Advantia’s brand conventions to speak to this niche consumer group, our team surveyed variations of the Advantia’s brand conventions to land on a refined palette, photographic and illustrative styling, and voice, outlined in the above Brand Book. 

These carefully curated identity conventions informed all our physical space design decisions, as well as print and digital advertising campaigns driving potential members to our website.  This refined brand identity also enhances the design of the website itself, aimed at membership acquisition and appointment booking on the front end, with curated content, educational resources, and special event features within a member portal sub-site. 

 
 

Designing Liv’s new home

We partnered with Alda Ly Architecture (ALA), an all-female architecture studio, to create a clinic environment that enables comfort, cultivates community, and empowers women to make educated health choices. I led design management with their team to ensure we maintained brand continuity across all interior design decisions, while supporting our new user experience and clinical care model.  Unique design features make for a better experience, including a dedicated nook in each exam room with a vanity, a closet for personal items, and a seating area for a partner or post-visit discussion; several telehealth phone booths for privacy and care on-the-go; and a “Mother’s Room” for private nursing, pumping, or changing that is accessible to the community.

“Areas for patients and staff were approached with the same level of attention, driven by the goal of making all women who enter the building feel at ease and supported. Three central concepts—comfort, community, and choice—informed all aspects of the Liv flagship, which includes waiting areas for patients; staff areas that accommodate both individualized work and socialization; and exam rooms to support our integrated care model. The environment registers as both a community hub for building connections between women and an intimate refuge for individual wellness, where shifts in layout, color, and material palette indicate different programs” (ALA).

“The waiting area establishes numerous design strategies that extend across the Liv space. Broadly, biophilic principles, Liv's graphic identity, and inspiration from artworks by female artists like Ines Longevial, Laura Berger, and Lilian Thomas Burwell drive the color and material palette. More specifically, a softer palette of blush, lilac, tan, blond woods, and white and brass pendant lighting is applied to conversational, active areas. On the other hand, moodier, saturated tones like terracottas, mauves, and teals shroud more restful, intimate areas. Across both communal and restful areas, biophilic principles inform furniture and millwork that have curvaceous, organic edges and plush, enveloping surfaces meant to encourage rest and relaxation.

East and west sides of the corridor are color-coded in mauve and teal gradients; each room threshold is marked by a different color for easy identification; and all hallways end with a glowing arched niche encased in a Calico Wallpaper mural that acts as a guiding focal point and anchor. Sconces by SkLO in soft, hand-blown shapes reminiscent of women's breasts provide rhythm and enhance wayfinding along the corridor.

The color scheme of the exam rooms follows the teal and mauve gradients in the hallway. While some rooms are lighter and airier and others are darker and more intimate, a vibrancy atypical of traditional exam rooms fills all of them” (Dexigner.com).