Peoplefirst Rehabilitation Identity

Peoplefirst was spun off as a separate division in order to pursue the management of rehab departments of non-Kindred facilities. As a result, the primary goal of the logo was to look distinct from the parent company. Since the core facilities were Kindred-owned, however, there was a need to create a brand system that could function in concert with the Kindred-branded materials that already existed in those spaces.

I researched every rehab company in the country and compiled as much of their visual branding as possible. Our team was looking for design space where we could look and feel very different, and the largest space we found was in color. 

The purple of the logo was chosen as a departure from the ubiquitous blues of healthcare. The color way for the whole system then extends further past the common boundaries of the sector with rich reds and oranges.

The type treatment recalls the typeface of Kindred. The figure recalls the one in Kindred’s logo, but is unmistakably in motion - one of the primary goals for many of the patients Peoplefirst treats. 

One of the biggest challenges was the visual representation of the three different disciplines under the rehab umbrella: physical therapy (PT), occupational therapy (OT) and speech-language pathology (SLP). I sought to represent all three disciplines in a way that excluded photography as a first-order solution in order to bypass the usual concerns with photography in representing diversity of race, age and gender. 

Elegant tone-on-tone silhouettes depicting the three rehab disciplines were developed as the solution, and were one of the primary visual elements of the brand. It introduced people to the visual iconography, in a simple manner, which was important to a company named Peoplefirst.