Arnold Palmer Hospital
From a single legacy logo to an entire brand system that Florida's leading children's hospital runs on. A year of work, much of it still in service today.
The Brief
Arnold Palmer Hospital for Children had a name people trust and a logo that had been in place for years — and not much of a system around it. What it lacked was everything between the logo and the patient: a complete, documented brand the institution could actually operate on, consistently, across hundreds of physical and printed touchpoints. I was engaged to build that system from the ground up — to turn a mark into a language, and a language into every artifact a hospital of its size and standing depends on.
The Approach
This was systems thinking at full scale. Start from the existing logo, then define the whole world around it — typography, color, voice, identity standards — and a brand guide rigorous enough that any team, anywhere in the hospital, could apply it without me in the room. Then build the artifacts themselves. The discipline the work demanded is the same one I bring to any project: design for the person on the other side of it. A parent navigating the worst day of their life, a clinician moving fast, a child who needs the place to feel less frightening. In a hospital, brand isn't decoration. Wayfinding that fails is a family lost on the way to the NICU. The stakes were real, and they set the bar.
The Build
A complete brand system and the full library of deliverables built on it, over roughly a year: the identity standards and brand guide; signage and wayfinding; advertising and campaign work; web; business cards and stationery; environmental and print collateral; even the ambulance wraps. Effectively every surface where the hospital meets a patient, a family, or the public — designed once, documented, and handed off as a system the institution could run on its own.
The Outcome
A foundational brand system that still underpins much of what's in place today, years later — the rare engagement where the work didn't just launch, it stuck. It served an institution that continues to operate at the top of its field: a 158-bed children's hospital, part of Central Florida's only Level One pediatric trauma center, and named a U.S. News & World Report "Best Children's Hospital" for 15+ consecutive years — Orlando's only nationally ranked children's hospital. Some of my best and largest brand work, in service of one of the highest-stakes audiences there is.
In a children's hospital, a brand system isn't decoration — it's how a frightened family finds the right door. That's design for the other side of the screen, off the screen entirely.