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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.
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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.
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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.
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Some early-stage explorations we delivered as well:
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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)