Intermountain Children’s Health: Designing for the Full Emotional Journey of Care
Challenge: When a child enters the hospital, it’s never just clinical, it’s deeply emotional. Intermountain Children’s Health, a dedicated sub-brand within Intermountain Health, needed to bring the parent brand’s promise of partnership to life for children across an extraordinarily broad age range, from newborns to teenagers.
The challenge was creating one identity that could acknowledge what children are really feeling and adapt as they grow, without becoming too childish for older patients or too sophisticated for younger ones, while still feeling connected to the broader Intermountain brand.
Opportunity: For children, partnership starts with feeling seen and understood. We saw an opportunity to acknowledge the full range of emotions that come with healthcare, from fear and sadness to joy and hope, and make those feelings a meaningful part of the brand.
By validating those emotions rather than masking them, Children’s Health could become a more empathetic partner throughout a child’s care.
Bringing Emotions to Life Through a Flexible, Age-Adaptive Identity
Solution: We built the system around eight core emotions, turning feelings like fear, sadness, joy and hope into visible expressions children could recognize and relate to. For younger patients, those emotions became bespoke characters that act as companions throughout their care.
As patients grow, the identity grows with them. The characters become more abstract, while color, typography, imagery and messaging mature to connect authentically with adolescents and teens. The full toolkit is mapped across an age spectrum, giving teams a clear framework for creating age-appropriate experiences while maintaining one cohesive brand.
Results: The new identity helped build awareness for Intermountain Children’s Health and has successfully scaled across its growing network of hospitals and care environments. As the system continues to expand into new markets, including a new children’s hospital in Las Vegas, the identity has proven flexible enough to adapt across locations, ages and experiences while remaining consistently recognizable.
The brand system flexes to deliver to an older and much harder to reach audience: teenagers
Leaning into the more abstract elements of the toolbox, and relying on messaging for a literate audience, the system flexes to connect with tween and teen patients . The journey below was created for Intermountain Children’s Behavioral health facility.
Using our abstract pattern with other elements of our system, we created a brand experience that elevates key touchpoints for mental health recovery such as: The welcome desk at the Mental health facility, the gym which is crucial for treatment, a notebook essential for journaling, and other touchpoints to improve their experience during their stay and treatment period at the center.
