A peek into the process behind Thyme Care’s updated look

A strong brand creates a language and identity that helps patients and partners understand and connect with us. ​​When Thyme Care launched just over two years ago, we were very intentional about the brand we wanted to create: A brand that offers a compassionate and trustworthy companion for individuals navigating a cancer diagnosis. We recognized the importance of building a brand that would instill a sense of safety, understanding, and support in our members. We wanted to be there for them in a way that few others could, to offer them a helping hand when they needed it most. Today, as we look back at our journey, we're proud of the brand that we built and how it truly reflects our values of empathy, compassion, and trust.

Through growth and experience, we came to realize that our brand needed to evolve and better represent who we are, the partners we collaborate with, and the innovative solutions we're driving in the healthcare industry.

Our new brand evolution is the result of that process, and we're excited to share it with you. 

First things first

We've always believed in putting our members first and making sure they feel comforted, seen, and supported. While our original focus has not wavered, we recognized an opportunity to better highlight our value to our partners, particularly those with backgrounds in business or clinical settings. We started with an employee survey, and this quote aptly summed up our objective moving forward: 

“Our brand is incredibly warm and caring, which I think resonates especially well with our members, although at times it feels at odds with our desire to show up as a trusted, credible brand to providers and health plans.”

–Thyme Care Employee

Our driving question became, "How can we maintain the warm, approachable personality that our members love, while also projecting our credibility and expertise that speaks to our relationships with healthcare providers and health plans?" It was clear that a brand update was necessary to strike the right balance and appeal to our diverse audience base. So, we set out on a journey to audit and refresh our visual brand, with the goal of making interacting with our brand a better journey for all our audiences.

“Refresh”

With our driving question settled, we rolled up our sleeves and kicked off a thorough inquiry - complete with an internal audit of all our products and materials, audience surveys, competitive analyses, and a fun trend approval matrix. With cross-departmental collaboration and careful consideration, we determined that a brand refresh was the best way forward.

We set out to define this refresh as an evolution of our brand, one that incorporates our beloved elements while also modernizing and streamlining our visual identity. We value the unique elements of our former branding, such as our recognizable Plum color and hand-drawn illustrations, and didn't want to lose these key components. However, we recognized the importance of expanding our guidelines to allow for greater flexibility and nuance, while maintaining precision and cohesion across departments with things like accessibility standards and universal data systems. Our aim is to better communicate our expertise and credibility to healthcare providers and health plans, ‌ while remaining our warm, approachable self. We feel like we’ve landed in the right place.

What’s new

• Color palettes: While our signature Plum remains the same, we’ve added a darker shade of Tyrian Purple to improve legibility across mediums and lend a subtle elegance to our branding. We also refined our secondary color palette to include more subdued jewel tones, and added a tertiary palette to meet the accessibility needs of our product and data teams.

• Typography: We felt strongly that our hero font could do a lot of the heavy lifting in terms of visual messaging, and we were excited to discover P22 Mackinac, a distinctly human and welcoming typeface. We paired it with DM Sans for a fresh and modern look, and believe the combination better resonates with our audiences.

• Graphic elements: We are producing far more content than ever before, and it was important to define shapes and patterns that could be used to create visual variety while being immediately identifiable as Thyme Care. We elaborated on our previous system to create elements that bring in both a sense of structure and organic movement.

• Imagery: Our beloved illustration style is staying the same, with some color tweaks to reflect our new secondary palette. We also are updating our entire photo library (still a work in progress!) to better reflect our members and where they currently are in their journey. 

What’s next

Thyme Care's new look is a compliment to where we've been and a push forward to where we're going. We are excited to continue building brand recognition while broadening our visual identity to account for new products, initiatives, and partnerships.

Written by: Caitlin Hohn, Thyme Care Brand Designer