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escaping
emerson

Website for a medical technology company
Marketing materials for a medical technology company

escaping
emerson

medical technology branding and marketing

the challenge    A tech startup had developed a wearable heart monitor for use by medical professionals. They were working on another for consumers and had a list of other medtech devices they planned to develop. And they were headed for an IPO. Their communications had been limited to efforts to attract investors. They were only just becoming aware of the regulatory constraints they would face. And branding and marketing were unfamiliar territory to the engineers running the company, who were caught in the grip of the better-mousetrap fallacy—which I call “Emerson’s Lie.”

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the solution    Thanks to my own work in the tech sector and my parallel background in science, these challenges weren’t unfamiliar to me. Working quickly but carefully, I developed the company’s core brand and multi-channel marketing strategies. With the foundations laid, I designed an extensible branding system matched to the company’s expanding array of products and customers. Finally, I meticulously crafted a full range of
marketing instruments, from their website to print collateral.

.
tl;dr    Medical technology branding and marketing are bound by many conventions—some the result of regulatory constraints and others rooted in mass culture. I scrupulously observed the first while leveraging the second.

Since they were starting with products aimed at two very different markets—with diverse products to follow—I concluded that the core of the branding system ought to consist of typographically consistent product wordmarks further united by the use of a corporate icon. The pre-existing industrial design of their first product suggested that a circular icon would be best. After exploring many possibilities and subtle variations, I based my design on the following rhodonea curve:

Rhodonea curve used as the basis a glyph logo for a medical technology company

There wasn’t room in the budget for the design of a custom typeface, so I reviewed myriad commercial fonts, hunting for the requisite combination of geniality, sophistication, consistency with the glyph, and consonances between letterforms appearing in the company and product names. I chose Cera, a superb geometric sans serif designed by Jakob Runge, as the new identity typeface. Of course, when it came to designing the standard typographic settings of the company and product names, I redrew the letters to adapt them even more closely to their purpose. But I used Runge’s original typeface in body copy in the company’s new marketing collateral and website.

In designing the company’s website, my attention to detail extended to the careful colour-grading of every image to match the new identity colour palette I’d developed. (Their previous identity colour had been black—which I strongly advised was not a propitious choice for a medical technology company.) Needless to say, the website met the full checklist of technical requirements, including its being seamlessly responsive.

Since their products were evolving rapidly, it’s not surprising that I did not have, and could not have, access to product photography of acceptable quality. I therefore created all the product images used on the website and in marketing collateral I designed for them using CG. Here is a detail from one such computer rendering—which, though visually stylized to match the brand style, is scrupulously faithful to the most minute engineering details:

Expertise required
.
Advertising design
Brand research & analysis
Brand strategy
Brand identity design
Branding standards
Computer-generated imagery
Concept development
Copywriting
Graphic design
Social media
Web design
Web development

medical technology branding and marketing

the challenge    A tech startup had developed a wearable heart monitor for use by medical professionals. They were working on another for consumers and had a list of other medtech devices they planned to develop. And they were headed for an IPO. Their communications had been limited to efforts to attract investors. They were only just becoming aware of the regulatory constraints they would face. And branding and marketing were unfamiliar territory to the engineers running the company, who were caught in the grip of the better-mousetrap fallacy—which I call “Emerson’s Lie.”

.
the solution    Thanks to my own work in the tech sector and my parallel background in science, these challenges weren’t unfamiliar to me. Working quickly but carefully, I developed the company’s core brand and multi-channel marketing strategies. With the foundations laid, I designed an extensible branding system matched to the company’s expanding array of products and customers. Finally, I meticulously crafted a full range of
marketing instruments, from their website to print collateral.

.
tl;dr    Medical technology branding and marketing are bound by many conventions—some the result of regulatory constraints and others rooted in mass culture. I scrupulously observed the first while leveraging the second.

Since they were starting with products aimed at two very different markets—with diverse products to follow—I concluded that the core of the branding system ought to consist of typographically consistent product wordmarks further united by the use of a corporate icon. The pre-existing industrial design of their first product suggested that a circular icon would be best. After exploring many possibilities and subtle variations, I based my design on the following rhodonea curve:

Rhodonea curve used as the basis a glyph logo for a medical technology company

There wasn’t room in the budget for the design of a custom typeface, so I reviewed myriad commercial fonts, hunting for the requisite combination of geniality, sophistication, consistency with the glyph, and consonances between letterforms appearing in the company and product names. I chose Cera, a superb geometric sans serif designed by Jakob Runge, as the new identity typeface. Of course, when it came to designing the standard typographic settings of the company and product names, I redrew the letters to adapt them even more closely to their purpose. But I used Runge’s original typeface in body copy in the company’s new marketing collateral and website.

In designing the company’s website, my attention to detail extended to the careful colour-grading of every image to match the new identity colour palette I’d developed. (Their previous identity colour had been black—which I strongly advised was not a propitious choice for a medical technology company.) Needless to say, the website met the full checklist of technical requirements, including its being seamlessly responsive.

Since their products were evolving rapidly, it’s not surprising that I did not have, and could not have, access to product photography of acceptable quality. I therefore created all the product images used on the website and in marketing collateral I designed for them using CG. Here is a detail from one such computer rendering—which, though visually stylized to match the brand style, is scrupulously faithful to the most minute engineering details:

Expertise required

Advertising design
Brand research & analysis
Brand strategy
Brand identity design
Branding standards
Computer-generated imagery
Concept development
Copywriting
Graphic design
Social media
Web design
Web development