Equitable Healthcare Action Lab
Creating a new visual identity for a growing lab
2023
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.
Visual Identity
The visual identity was developed to bring the lab in line with the broader Institute of Design identity, created by Collins, while creating enough new material to ensure past, present, and future work could be displayed consistently.
To align with the Institute of Design identity, the typefaces chosen were Bradford and Gerstner. Bradford handles titles and display use; Gerstner, being more legible at smaller sizes, carries most of the body content and templates.
Colors
The color palette uses pastel greens and blues as accents against primarily white space. The range of colors was intentional: different hues allow templates to be distinguished by project or content type without adding visual noise.
Grid
Research lab spaces are inherently organic: work goes up and comes down constantly, and no two projects look the same. Rather than impose a rigid structure, I built the identity around a subtle grid that runs across all the boards. It keeps things aligned and legible without constraining how students and faculty use the space. The grid is there when you need it, and invisible when you don't.
Templates
With the grid established, I designed a set of templates that would allow anyone in the lab to put work up quickly and consistently: whether they were displaying new research, revisiting an old project, or setting up a board from scratch in the new space.
The baseline template is sized for the 4×8' boards mounted throughout the lab, providing margins and alignment guides. Title templates are printed and mounted on foam board to designate each project bay. Supplementary templates for research artifacts, photographs, and section headers come in Letter (8.5×11") and Tabloid (11×17") formats: standard sizes that can be printed on any inkjet printer without special equipment.
Physical Environment
To complete the environment, I selected a range of accessories chosen to complement the color palette and suit the day-to-day reality of a working research space: Post-it notes in the Oasis collection, large wooden thumbtacks for pinning work to boards, and color-matched green folders for organizing physical documents.
Introduction Boards
The first set of boards serves to introduce the overall lab space, and the projects in progress in each bay
Divider Boards
This set of boards divides the space. Images from past workshops humanizes the space and showcases the lab’s focus on human centered design and participatory research.
Operational Tools
Beyond the visual and physical environment, two additional tools were developed to support how the lab operates — these sit closer to service design than visual design, but were a core part of the brief.
Project Intake Form
To make it easier for clinicians and researchers from the University of Chicago Medical Center to initiate projects with the lab, I designed a project intake form to help them articulate their requirements and allow the lab to assess whether a project was a good fit. The form was built in REDCap - a secure platform already in use across the health system - to ensure it could be shared and completed within existing institutional infrastructure.
Project Assessment Survey
To help the lab understand the impact of completed projects and improve its processes over time, I also developed a project assessment survey for distribution to project stakeholders. This was also built in REDCap for the same reasons.
