epocrates Creative Strategy
Black Math x athenahealth
Good design elevates, invigorates, and empowers us all—no matter what kind of work we do.
When it came time to refresh a legacy brand with a legacy product, one that saves lives and is already in use by over a million health care professionals, creative strategy was key. We were fortunate that our partners at athenahealth knew it, too; a casual glow-up wouldn’t do justice to this valuable tool.
Epocrates instead deserved deep and thoughtful exploration, analysis, and design research. We began with an understanding of its industry and audience; pulled apart the constraints of the app and how it delivers information; then moved on to unravel its existing brand guidelines.
Our artists honed in on three paths toward an elevated design universe: GRAPHIC, FLUID, and SPATIAL. We played with use cases ranging from app loading screens to universal patterns to product workflows and global video openers / closers, pushing each direction to its limit in a test of how its properties would extend into all aspects of the user journey.
Our North Star was always to instill pride and confidence in both the builders and the users of epocrates. In the end, we passed off a set of tools that empowered the internal design team and left flexibility for the realities of keeping a robust app thriving, while elevating the day-to-day interactions of the professionals who rely on it.
Some early-stage explorations we delivered as well:
Credits
Client: athenahealth
Creative Direction: Jeremy Sahlman, Chrissy Eckman
Producer: Rebecca Smith
Artists: Marcus Bakke, Renaud Lavency, Omid Seraj, Jake Williams, Stephen Kelleher, Omid Seraj, Meredith Binnette, Celia Hsu, Jules Guerin, Anna Yang, Steve Madden, Rasita Kartarahardja
Produced by Black Math
Executive Team: Jeremy Sahlman (ECD), Evan Fellers (CEO), Alexandra Williams (EP, Boston), Stephanie Rabins (EP, New York)