The Fuse Identity

Medium: Integrated
Company: McKesson / RelayHealth
Role: Design Direction, Brand Strategy, Identity Design
Year: 2017

Challenge:
Design a complete visual identity system from which to express the strategic brand experience for the Fuse platform—one that rendered equally well for user interface design and conventional marketing communication platforms.

Solution:
Once the philosophy and design of the logo were settled, we were able to execute on building the supporting visual elements that would engender the target customer experience—the research and discovery associated with the logo development process heavily influenced our approach. Still, the brand's fluency with the user interfaces and data presentations that were the real driver was the need for the brand's fluency. In the end, we created a collection of elements that effectively expressed the new brand on both sides of the computer screen.

Color Palette

One of the primary ways we linked the Fuse identity to the parent RelayHealth brand was through color. We adopted most of the original palette, augmenting it with new tints and shades and an additional color, aqua.
 

The new additions created a wider pool from which to draw and develop an overall engaging identity and afford new experiential tones to augment the customer journey.

Fuse Logo System

Part of the strategic communication plans for Fuse was parsing out its primary feature set—interoperability, storage, scalability, and curation of health data—and establishing a more distinct customer experience subset for each. We addressed this by creating a spectrum of logos that would reflect each communication setting using the color palette to inform the design.

Besides versions designed for light or dark backgrounds, we created a tinted utility set intended for information graphics and similar settings–places the Fuse logo would be more effective in a visually integrated state.

Typography

At its core, Fuse is a data platform with requirements beholden to user interfaces and data presentation. With this in mind, I researched fonts that would render well at all scales, from mobile screens to billboards.

Due to its expansive character set, designed to eliminate "tofu" box substitution for missing characters, and its inherent humanistic feel, the san-serif variant of the Google-designed font, Noto, was chosen.

Iconography

The same conditions around scalability and legibility were also applied in developing an icon library for Fuse, with both developers and marketers using the library equally. It required a wide range of mutability to convey basic ideas around functionality and the platform's more complex and proprietary aspects.

We acquired a massive catalog of glyphs that fulfilled all our needs. It included both requisite user-interface elements and conceptual ideograms for marketing communications and provided a superb foundation to custom design industry-specific graphics it did not include.

Patterns

To further develop a distinct set of visual experiences around the feature set of Fuse, I created a series of five representative graphic patterns. As with the hexagon deconstructive grid that informed the logo design, I made a further sub-divided version that would act as the baseline structure of the pattern framework.

Process for constructing feature-influenced patterns

Final pattern library for the Fuse feature suite

Imagery

The Fuse brand imagery needed to be vibrant, energetic, and future-forward, abstractly portraying the new frontiers of the data-driven healthcare industry.

Because literal portrayal of the platform itself was difficult, I selected imagery evocative of the brand voice and tone for different stages in the customer journey and the intended emotional state, specific to each step.