Intermountain Children’s Health: Designing a Brand That Honors Every Emotion
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 an identity that could support patients from newborns to teens while staying strategically linked to the master brand. The existing system couldn’t flex across such a wide age range or acknowledge the emotional intensity children and parents experience throughout care.
Opportunity: This was an opportunity to build a brand rooted in empathy — one that validates how children genuinely feel on their health journey. By creating a system that adapts to age, maturity, and context, we could design an identity that comforts the youngest patients, respects older teens, and remains cohesive within the broader Intermountain ecosystem.
Bringing Emotions to Life Through a Flexible, Age-Adaptive Identity
Solution: To support children through every stage of care, we created a brand system centered on eight core emotions — from fear and sadness to joy and relief. These emotions became a set of bespoke characters for younger patients, transforming feelings into visible companions who guide them through their stay. As children grow, the characters evolve into more abstract graphic forms, while the palette, typography, and messaging mature to connect authentically with adolescents and teens.
The full design toolkit is mapped along an age spectrum, giving teams clear guidance for selecting age-appropriate elements across clinics, hospitals, digital experiences, and behavioral health environments. This ensures the brand remains consistent yet adaptable, meeting each child where they are emotionally and developmentally.
Results: The new identity elevates pediatric care across Intermountain’s entire system — from welcome areas and treatment rooms to behavioral health spaces, activity centers, and therapeutic tools like journals. It creates a compassionate, flexible experience that supports children and teens through moments of vulnerability and empowerment, strengthening Intermountain’s promise to care for every child with empathy, clarity, and understanding.
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.
