Practo Health is a deeply personal matter, and we are humbled that millions of people trust Practo for their health choices. It is the place that connects them to everything they need to take good care of themselves and their loved ones. Whether it is about getting an opinion on a health issue or finding the right doctor for them, Practo helps millions of people live longer, healthier lives every day.
Practo’s premise is simple. It is ‘Your home for health’
Our teams work tirelessly to make sure that this home has everything you’re looking for. As we added more functionality, our products became more complex, and we struggled to maintain the simplicity our users loved. Our goal has always been to keep Practo trustworthy, warm, and welcoming to all our consumers and healthcare providers.
Realising this need, 18 months ago we looked for someone to help us keep our vision simple across everything we do. Our search led us to the legendary New York based firm — Chermayeff & Geismar & Haviv (CGH), who have created some of the most iconic and loved brands across the world.
Our new identity:
The logo is simple, elegant and bold. It symbolises the role Practo plays in the healthcare ecosystem. The two circles represent any two entities that need to connect. These could be doctors and patients, hospitals and insurers, or any other entities that wish to interact to fulfil their health needs. Practo is at its center, enabling these connections. This is what our platform is about — building a better, more connected global healthcare system.
The logo is designed to be highly symmetrical and leverages the unique connections that exist between the letters of Practo. Together with the dark blue and sky blue (or saffron), it conveys a sense of reliability and calmness — important in the healthcare sector. We have used the circle — a shape that is all curves and no corners to reflect a platform which is friendly, caring and approachable.
While Search has been our most used product, we have much more to offer as a platform to both consumers and healthcare providers. We needed to distinguish our identity across these two worlds but still remain fundamentally true to the soul of Practo.
Illustrations:
Bringing this idea of ‘Your Home for Health’ to life needed something bold and vibrant. We chose to do this by using illustrations to depict the freshness and warmth of the brand, in a way words alone could not convey. Our illustrating team spent months slaving over explorations before they narrowed down to this new visual voice.
Final illustration style:
The style that emerged is warm, comforting and very core to the motto of Practo. As a brand, we never want to be in a space of negative emotions. We believe the user already has very high anxiety and we don’t want to be a brand that plays on this, but instead, we want to take it away entirely. Simply put, we want our users to smile every time they think of our brand. This philosophy extends not just to our products but even to our marketing campaigns.
Illustrations are paired with Practo’s marketing pages and products. They support content wherever required, to make it easier to understand and consume. The style was finalised such that it was easily adaptable by any designer in the organisation. As always, the illustrations were very tongue-in-cheek, which made them unique and very fun to design.
Some of the finer points we followed with our illustrations:
A few from our final set of illustrations:
Brand and UX:
How do we deliver a single beautifully designed experience which weaves seamlessly through all our various offerings? And more importantly, how do we change already designed, regularly used products?
With this question in mind, we started exploring our options. We needed to collaborate UX with branding. We needed to make our products speak together and give one unified experience.
This is where our collaboration with CGH played an important role. Even though CGH and our team worked from different locations, we were able to crack this exercise. We worked together to ensure that the brand guidelines complemented our products well. This was an amazing experience for us working with international leaders in branding at CGH.
We went back to the drawing board several times to make sure we got everything exactly right. The project took more than 18 months, but today when we have launched, we have a unified, cohesive identity built on a style-guide that is true to our brand.
While we got the style guide in place we also created a central repository for icons and illustrations. Our icon repository, which is called ‘Practicons’, now has over 220 icons used across all our products. But building the style-guide was only half the battle, we now needed to implement this.
To be honest, this was not very easy but we were able to pull it off because we were united in our dream for a better Practo. Our Design, Product, Engineering and Marketing teams worked night and day to bring this vision to life. Through crazy days and intense times, we did some of our best work, and we’re very happy, excited and to be honest, slightly nervous, to unveil ‘Practo — Your home for health’. We hope you like the new Practo as much as we do and more importantly, we hope we can help you and your loved ones live healthier longer lives.
How does it all come together? Below are a few samples, but we would love for you to check out our apps and our website. Let us know what you think.
We believe that with the new brand identity, we have taken a significant step towards realising our vision of making people live healthier, and longer lives.
We thank everyone, who’ve supported us through our journey so far!
#DoGreat