Branding

My Role

I served as the Creative Director and Lead Designer for a the branding of an up-and-coming Direct Primary Care clinic in the Finger Lakes region of New York. This included brand strategy, logo system design, color palette development, typography selection, brand guidelines, photography direction, website copy, and print collateral, with the collaborative support from a web development partner.

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The Challenge

Direct Primary Care is a growing movement, but most DPC practices launch with branding that looks indistinguishable from the traditional healthcare system they're actively rejecting. Generic blues, stock photography, clinical typography — a visual language that signals the same transactional, insurance-driven model these physicians left on purpose.

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Dr. Alexandra Bersani needed a brand that told a completely different story. She is a board-certified Family Medicine physician and Osteopathic Manipulation specialist who spent years inside the fee-for-service system before returning to her roots in Upstate New York's Finger Lakes region to build a practice centered entirely on the doctor-patient relationship. Her brand needed to reflect not just what she does, but why she left the traditional healthcare model, and what she's building instead.

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In our first meeting, she told me she wanted her clinic to feel like "walking through the woods, sitting down near a rippling stream, a gentle breeze on your face, warm sun on your back, talking to your doctor about your health as you would a knowledgeable and trusted friend."

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That became our creative brief.

 

The Approach

As with many businesses, our work started with location, location, location. The Finger Lakes region isn't just where Dr. Bersani is building her practice, it's where her family has practiced medicine for generations. Rooting the brand in that specific geography and ancestry gave us something few other healthcare brands could claim.​

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The logo system is built around a badge featuring native Finger Lakes conifers above a root system whose shape mirrors the Finger Lakes themselves, one of many intentional details embedded throughout the brand that reveal themselves over time.

 

The brand palette is drawn entirely from the landscape: Everglade, Canopy, Sage, Birch, Harvest, Cayuga, Skaneateles, Seneca. Every color has a name and a story. The type system pairs Roca, a warm, humanist serif, with Brother 1816, a clean geometric sans, to balance approachability with authority. The same balance the practice embodies.​​

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The brand manifesto, "Passionate Invitation. Radical Welcome," emerged from deep discovery conversations with Dr. Bersani about who she is as a physician and who she wants to serve. It isn't a tagline. It's a doctrine that defines how the brand shows up in every appointment, every sign, and every piece of communication.

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The final brand guidelines document equipped Dr. Bersani and her team to deploy the brand consistently and confidently, with clear rules, rationale, and real-world usage examples across print, digital, and environmental applications.

 

Final Assets

• Brand strategy & manifesto

• Complete logo system (primary logo, primary badge, secondary badge, icon marks, icon badges, 1- and 2-line wordmarks)

• Full color palette (6 primary + 9 secondary colors, all named)

• Typography system

• Photography art direction

• Brand guidelines document (35 pages)

• Print collateral (business cards, appointment cards, letterhead, promotional flyer)

• Website design & copy

 

The Results

• Delivered a complete, launch-ready brand identity system for a DPC practice launching in Upstate New York

• Created a brand that visually and strategically differentiates Bersani Family Medicine from both traditional healthcare and generic DPC competitors

• Built a scalable identity system with enough depth and flexibility to grow alongside the practice for years

• Established a replicable creative framework for DPC branding that Abby Blunt Creative is now actively bringing to the broader Direct Primary Care space