In the spring of 2022, the Creative Services team at Penn Medicine was approached with the task of rebranding the Women's Health service line. As the art direcor of this service line, I chose to create a creative brief with key stakeholders to ensure our goals were aligned before diving into this rebrand and to understand the need in its entirety. This way we weren't making a new design that just looks nice... we wanted it to make sense.

The Problem

We quickly recognized one of the biggest problems at hand was the various color schemes used across our women's health sub-programs, as well as fulfilling the client request for everything to be brought into a more modern and cohesive design. However, before we got started, we asked ourselves the following questions: Who are we marketing to? Who is a Penn Medicine woman? What is our message?

We essentially came up with the answer that Penn Medicine empowers women to be their healthiest selves through top-of-the-line care that is as unique as each patient. Our audience is real women at all (very different) stages of their life, meeting them wherever they are on their journey. In developing this statement, we knew we wanted to make this rebrand as inclusive as possible, not just through gender identity, but through all demographics, socioeconomic disadvantages, language barriers, and disabilities. 

I took a look at all of our Women's Health subprograms and conducted a visual audit of the color palettes and styles used. Are they consistent across each program? Does the green in fertility match the green in gynecologic oncology care? We started to narrow down these color palettes to move forward in our process and began stripping away the feminine aspects of the design, such as the script fonts that were difficult to read for patients of different reading levels and legibility. We strove to find a good balance between sophisticated, modern, and science with a personal flair.

A visual audit of the existing Women's Health programs at Penn Medicine.

The Color Study and Inspiration

I pulled each color from each program and took note of where there was overlap, where there were discrepancies, and started to establish rules where these palettes could connect. We wanted to ensure some color recognition within each program, so the goal was to narrow down these larger color palettes to about three colors. I gathered several different forms of visual inspiration, looked at simplifying our font pairings, how to use more neutral color palettes and thought about how our new look can feel gender neutral yet sophisticated and feminine.

A color study of the existing Women's Health programs at Penn Medicine depicting the before and after.

The Result

This process led us to where we are today. I chose to include big splashes of our Penn blue to anchor us to our overarching brand, acting as a neutral throughout all of the Women's Health pieces. We've ditched the script font and opted for a larger, extended font with subtle touches of a hand-written tertiary font (which alludes to our women's health ad campaign that featured a variety of hand-written type, reinforcing the mindset that each patient is unique). 

I also included a wavy texture with circles, symbolizing that no one journey is the same. It can cross over, go forward, backwards with stops along the way. Each circle symbolizes our various sub-programs in this service line, featuring its own color scheme and adds a little touch of clarification with a corresponding icon for those at a lower reading level. This idea stems from total patient care. If you come to Penn Medicine for primary care, you can come to Penn Medicine for fertility, maternity, and so on.

Here we have several booklet cover examples to see how these palettes can vary across these sub-programs.  Carrying the Penn blue neutral allows for each sub-program to have its own identifying palette while still feeling like it's part of the same Women's Health family. Fertility continues to have the softer pinks and purples that bring hope and comfort to a sensitive topic. Maternity has it's familiar deep yellows and oranges, steering more into a gender neutral palette than the hints of blues and pinks it previously used. Gynecologic Oncology continues it's teal and green borrowed from the cancer service line, feeling a bit of tech and trust in these while maintaining the consistent palette from a separate service line. Urogynecology has more muted tones with hints of light pink or blue while general women's health has combination of Penn red and light blue, alluding back to our overarching brand palette. 

Seeing these all lined up together hints back at that patient journey and the places each patient can be along the way, as no patient journey is the same.

Project Highlights

This rebrand is an ongoing initiative at Penn Medicine to modernize the Women's Health service line while making it as inclusive and unique as each patient's journey.

The ability to work with multiple teams from concept to production, including department chairs across the entire health system, marketing directors, program managers, and more.

Creative freedom to conceptualize, research, and execute a design system that solves the problem at hand

Presented to multiple department chairs across the health system with little to no revisions

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Jersey Born, Philly Based
Email: [email protected]
Instagram: @k.line_design

© Kelly Lineman 2023 Graphic Designer

"It's supposed to be hard. If it was easy, everyone would do it. The hard is what makes it great"— Jimmy Dugan, A League of Their Own, 1992