Nine clinics that finally look like one organisation

We ran a facilitated strategy day with the clinical directors and the two founders. Not a mood board exercise. Nine practice managers had nine different answers to what happens when a patient walks in, and the point of the day was to end with one written answer that all of them could live with.

The page that came out of it is what the identity was then designed against. It fits on a single sheet and it is pinned up in every reception in the group.

Almost everything a patient touches at Sesi is a form filled in by hand, often standing up, often by someone who is anxious. So the type is larger than a designer would naturally set it, the fields are sized for adult handwriting rather than for the layout, and the sequence follows the order the reception staff actually ask the questions in.

We sat in three receptions and watched people fill in the old forms before redrawing them. Four fields were being skipped by almost everyone. Three of them turned out not to be needed at all.

Signage, forms and the website first, because that is what a patient sees. Uniforms, vehicle livery and the internal documents over the following year, as the old stock ran out rather than being thrown away. A rebrand that puts a group out of pocket on stationery is a rebrand that gets resented internally.