Good Day. This spring I did something I did not expect. I walked into a hospital's audiovisual department and set about turning it into an ad agency. The result is a new Creative Services Department inside Covenant Health, and helping build it has been the most meaningful work of my career so far.
The larger task was a rebrand. Caritas Health Group is becoming Covenant Health, and I have had the privilege of working on that transformation alongside a friend who serves as a vice president of communications, an ally who understood that good design is not decoration in a place like this. It is part of how an institution earns trust.
What we built out of that old AV room, based at the Grey Nuns and Misericordia hospitals, is a genuine internal agency, a creative function that can serve the whole organization rather than scramble job by job. We are carrying graphics and brand across fourteen facilities throughout Alberta, which is a scale I had not worked at before, and it asks a different kind of discipline. At that size, consistency is not a nicety. It is the brand itself.
Designing for healthcare has changed me. You are not making something cleverer than the competition. You are making something that meets a person on what may be a frightening day, and treats them with calm and clarity and respect. That responsibility sits differently in the chest than a commercial brief does.
I am still taking on freelance clients on the side, because I do not think I will ever fully stop, and the mix keeps me sharp. But the institutional work is teaching me something the freelance years could not, how to build a thing that outlasts me, a department and a standard that will keep serving long after any single project is done.
That is the part I am proudest of. Not a poster, not a logo, but a function, a way of working, set into an organization that cares for people. I came in to design a brand. I am leaving, eventually, having helped build something that will go on making good work when I am no longer in the room.
Jonathan Ellis · Edmonton · April 2009