Designing something to bring NHS organisations together
As I’m sure we are all aware, changes have been happening in the NHS over the last 12 months. My mini part of that was to find a way to bring us all together visually.
The illustration caused a bit of buzz at one of our cluster briefings so here’s a little bit of a shout out to it! Our cluster we are working on bringing together is NHS Bath, North East Somerset, Swindon and Wiltshire, NHS Dorset and NHS Somerset.
To get started we by looking at how we present our organisations. This included reviewing our individual visual identities, what they look like, our values, and how we use them. From this we were able to find common ground between the three, for example, we’re apparently all big fans of NHS Pink, NHS Purple and NHS Aqua Green.
The next step was designing something unique to our cluster, not just mixing what we already have into a big soup. We had the idea for an illustration that showed a bit of all of us and how we are coming together.
I wanted to incorporate three landmarks from each area, and they had to be landmarks that could fit easily with each other. For example, we couldn’t include the whole of Bournemouth’s pier, but we could fit the Helter Skelter which sits at the end. Our cluster comms colleagues fed back on which landmarks made the most sense for their place and that they thought would work as part of a wider illustration (Swindon’s Magic Roundabout was mentioned a couple of times!). I drew these on Procreate and then brought them together in Adobe Illustrator to build the layout of the cluster illustration. Fun fact – the first monument I drew was the wrong Wellington Monument!
We then built this core illustration into our new way of communicating all staff comms (the cluster intranet), as well as developing document templates and the lovely Teams background you might have seen across the patch. We developed complementary patterns to support each individual areas, and the cluster as a whole.
The great thing about this illustration is that we can keep adding to it or changing parts of it as we go. For now, we’ve got a great starting point that helps us feel more connected as organisations start working more closely together.
