Ad360
Crafting the visual identity and business plan for a new consultancy
2025
Branding
About
The Equitable Healthcare Action Lab at the Institute of Design at Illinois Tech partners with health systems, community organizations, and researchers to develop inclusive healthcare strategies and solutions.
As a student assistant working with Prof. Kim Erwin, I was brought in to address a practical problem: the lab had accumulated years of research across multiple projects, and the physical space had become difficult to navigate and present to outside collaborators. The work was real and substantial, but the environment didn't reflect that.
Over the course of the project, the lab relocated to a new space entirely, which meant the work expanded from reorganizing and documenting existing material to standing up a new environment from scratch. My role covered the full scope: developing a visual identity, designing a template system for displaying research, selecting physical materials for the space, setting up the new lab, and creating operational tools to support how the lab takes on and evaluates projects.
The Mark
The AD360 mark is built from a series of concentric rings of unequal weight. At the centre, the rings are dense and bold — almost solid, almost certain. Moving outward, they thin and separate, dissolving gradually into suggestion. The innermost circle holds a fixed point: the numeral 360, grounded, legible, contained.
The logic of the mark is the logic of the firm. The centre represents what is known — the current state of a client's audience, category, or competitive landscape. The outer rings represent what is forming: signals and pressures that are real but not yet resolved, visible to those who know how to read them, invisible to those who don't. The gradient from heavy to light is not decoration. It is a diagram of how certainty behaves over time.
The mark is also, deliberately, a complete circle. It does not open or fragment. Whatever the degree of uncertainty represented in its outer rings, the form closes. The 360° view holds.
Exploration
The chosen mark emerged from a process that covered considerable ground. Early directions explored pure typographic solutions — the name set in varying weights and cases, with the "360" functioning as numeral, descriptor, and graphic device simultaneously. A second direction explored aperture and radial burst forms, pursuing the idea of focus and revelation. A third developed elliptical and figure-eight ring systems, reading the name as two interlocking entities — research and design — in orbit. Floral and mandala forms were investigated for their completeness and symmetry. Overlapping circle constructions explored the intersection of disciplines.
Each direction had something to recommend it. The aperture marks were intelligent but too directly referential — a camera shutter is too specific a metaphor for a firm that is not primarily visual in orientation. The elliptical forms were distinctive but unstable: they implied movement without direction. The floral constructions were intricate but static, and at small sizes they lost the structural clarity the identity required.
The asymmetric concentric ring system solved what the others could not. It is simultaneously simple and complex, legible at scale and at small size, and it carries meaning that compounds the more closely it is read.
Typography
The primary typeface is Gotham. The choice is deliberate and unapologetic — Gotham is not fashionable, but it is precise. Its geometric construction mirrors the geometry of the mark; its range of weights gives the system the flexibility to move from headlines to footnotes without switching families. It is a typeface that communicates institutional credibility without institutional stiffness.
Color Palette
The primary palette is monochrome: full black and full white, with no intermediate greys except those produced by the mark itself at reduced scales. The decision is structural rather than aesthetic. An identity that claims breadth across disciplines — research, design, sound, motion, architecture — cannot anchor itself to a colour that belongs to one sector. Monochrome is neutral in the way that black type on white paper is neutral: it places all the emphasis on the quality of the thinking and the making.