DESIGN CASE STUDIES

Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta System Brochure

Creative Problem: The Children’s System Brochure is an oversized roll-fold print piece primarily handed out at national pediatric conferences. The audience is primarily physicians who may not be familiar with the Children’s brand, so the goal of the brochure is to quickly inform the medical professionals about Children’s and entice them to want to be a part of the organization. Since the piece is also one of many given out at these types of events, the piece also needed to be eye-catching and to stand out.

Challenges:

• Cut the copy length substantially
• Make the brochure “skim-friendly” so busy professionals would get the most out of the information we’re presenting
• No budget for a new photoshoot
• Tight 3-week turnaround deadline to production
• Production limited to simple offset printing on house paper, so no fancy substrate or embellishments could be used to catch reader attention

The old System Brochure:

Solution: I worked closely with the writer for this project to conceptualize a piece that would have a more professional, scientific feel to appeal to our professional audience. The writer wrote short paragraphs with bullet points to eliminate the long narrative style of the old piece. We also decided to pepper the new brochure with statistics about Children’s healthcare system to provide a “quick-shot” of information that could be quickly absorbed in a glance.

We had recently done a photoshoot of a pediatric cardiac surgery and came out with some compelling photos of the surgeons. I chose one for the cover that had a dramatic, chiaroscuro effect that got your attention and set the tone for the rest of the piece. I purposely stayed away from the “happy kid faces” as I felt that physicians would be more interested in the medical side, such as scans and test data (our market research confirmed this afterwards in our testing that revealed that physicians gravitate more towards information-based visuals than “happy kid faces”.)

The inside of the piece was designed to take advantage of the writing format the writer had created; this meant using implied lines to emphasize the grid used to design the brochure. We kept the piece the same size even though we had less copy to allow for more breathing room but still provide a good platform for the design. Also, this size was very economical to print.

Here is the result:

The brochure redesign was a great success, receiving a lot of positive feedback from both our external audience and within the internal leadership. The brochure design also became the precedent for many subsequent collateral pieces due to the positive response it received.

The writer and I also won a Bronze Flame award in the category of Nonprofit – Individual Piece in the International Association of Business Communicators (IABC) Atlanta Flame Awards for overall design and concept. 

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Systino to Listen360 Rebranding

Creative Problem: I was approached by the leadership of Systino Inc., a customer feedback management platform, to help with their upcoming name change to Listen360 and the subsequent new look and feel. Among the many new pieces to redesign was the Case Study one-sheets that the Listen360 sales team would use to show the benefits of their product to prospective customers, including handing them out at industry conventions.

Challenges:

• Create a new look and feel for the case studies while keeping consistent with the new branding that I was simultaneously developing
• Keep the main corporate colors (PMS 363, PMS 376 and Cool Grey 11) the same for the new brand to retain the connection for the people familiar with Systino
• Design a flexible template that will adapt to different photos and copy length, and yet remain consistent across the case studies featuring different clients
• Keep the Listen360 brand the main focus, even though the case studies feature other brands and their story
• Keep to one page front and back
• Use client-provided imagery

The old Systino Case Study:

Solution: While creating various other Listen360 pieces, I started an in-progress style guide to make sure everything I was doing remained consistent, which is important during a new brand launch. I worked with their writer to keep the copy to the right length and develop typography guidelines for pull quotes and boilerplates.

I used the margin border space to add splashes of the corporate colors, and added black to play off the bright green. The white in the center allowed for plenty of room to arrange text and photos, and the logo is displayed prominently on the front and back to reinforce the new brand name.

Here is the result:

The Listen360 team was pleased with the final result and liked the “magazine feel” of the layout. When spread out together, all of the completed client case studies made a nice presentation along with the rest of the new collateral. It was also easy to adapt the template to fit subsequent new case studies as they were written.