During my tenure at Science 37, I contributed to the company’s growth from a small team to over 250 employees nationwide. I advanced from the lone designer to Art Director, building and leading a multidisciplinary team of over 30. I designed a contemporary brand identity system that balanced personality, professionalism, and excitement for clinical research and technology. My creative oversight spanned corporate marketing, clinical trial recruitment, UI/UX development, and training materials, increasing recruitment speeds to 27 times the national average, with over 60% of participants from underserved backgrounds. This work played a key role in securing Series C ($29M) and Series D ($40M) funding, ultimately reducing the cost and increasing the efficiency of clinical research.
IDENTITY DESIGN
The mission of Science 37 is to bring scientific research to everyone, so I developed a contemporary visual design system to be inclusive and easily accessible to everyone. Because the company interacts with corporate sponsors and the scientific community, the look and feel needs to be professional, knowledgeable, and trustworthy. Since it also recruits patients for trials, the look and feel of the company also needs to be friendly, fun, and innovative. Due to these seemingly opposite needs, I created a visual brand identity and guidebook using a unifying design language to help external vendors be consistent with our look and feel.
ART DIRECTION
When creating a framework for the photography that we would use at Science 37, I wanted to choose images that were approachable and human, and provide a photographic style that captures real moments. This is a far step away from the standard stock photography and I was fortunate enough to have an in-house photography team on my team to direct.
I lead our photographers to capture moments that would resonate with prospective patients and have a warm and inviting spirit. I consciously stayed away from hiring models in favor of showing genuine and authentic slices of life. Any of the people featured would have the potential to be someone you know or could know. As patients are the center of clinical trials, everything in our photography was designed to help tell a human story.
In order to add some more pop to our photos, I designed a system of photography styles that we could use to help draw people into the story. For the corporate facing and B2B designs, I create a system of monotone images with a series of icons that would help create visual punctuation on our photos. To draw our patients into the images, our message was embedded into the images to encourage our patients to engage more with the content.
VISUAL DESIGN
Science, health, and technology should always feel accessible. In order to achieve this, I used illustrations to ease the burden of complex topics. In a semi-flat design style for the illustrative style at Science 37 so we could be instantly recognizable and stand out from the other clinical trial companies. I developed a colorful and inviting semi-flat design aesthetic that stretched across all branded materials from presentations, websites, to the web and mobile apps. These illustrations were heavily used in our patient-facing and social media materials and helped catch prospective patient’s eyes by being friendly and bold, but kept a trustworthy and approachable feeling. One of the largest hurdles of running a clinical trial is being able to recruit patients in a timely manner, during my time at Science 37 and the application of this style, we saw 50% faster patient recruitment than other sides within the same trial. All illustrations are my original artwork and were created in Adobe Illustrator.
