brain trauma foundation brain trauma foundation

Brain Trauma Foundation is a research-based nonprofit that physicians have trusted for a long time. It funds and conducts research on traumatic brain injury and publishes the evidence-based guidelines that inform how patients are treated in emergency rooms and intensive care units.

The foundation wanted to reach parents, coaches and patients too, ideally before a concussion ever happens, without losing the credibility it had earned with doctors. Working alongside the BTF team, I refreshed the logo and built the system around it: palette, typography, stationery, a conference banner, presentation templates, social and an outreach van.

Physicians and hospitals rely on the foundation’s guidelines, so its name carries real weight. Whatever we made, that trust couldn’t be put at risk.

At the same time, the BTF team wanted the brand to feel less corporate and more welcoming to families. The brief put it simply: mature and credible, but approachable and friendly. The new identity had to open that door without looking like a consumer brand.

The creative brief gave us three words, credible, helpful and innovative, and every sketch had to live up to all of them at once, from the mark to the stationery.

CREDIBLE

Thorough in everything, so physicians can trust the research and the results.

HELPFUL

A resource for medical professionals, patients and the people who love them.

INNOVATIVE

The most advanced research on traumatic brain injury, always pushing results forward.

The core audience is physicians, trauma specialists and researchers. The growth audience is parents, coaches and patients, often learning about concussion for the first time. What ties them together is trust: one foundation, speaking clearly to both.

Round one put three directions in front of the team: a lowercase b, BTF initials and a brain icon. The striped b stood out right away. The team said it already felt like a brain, with folds and a maze-like path, and its orange, sky blue and navy carried through to the end.

The founder wanted a mark that said more than a letter, something about how BTF helps people come back to themselves after an injury. So round two explored transformation, from broken to whole and dark to light. Round three tested BTF initials inside a ring, and a later round tried a BRAiN wordmark with overlapping circles. In the end, the b said more with less. It sits over the centered, two-row wordmark the founder asked for, and a b of its own anchors the sibling mark for B-TEC, the evidence-based research consortium the foundation works on with Stanford.

The palette comes straight from the logo: navy for the name, sky blue for FOUNDATION and orange for the b, with plenty of white around them. The wordmark is set in Century Gothic and Gotham, and Brandon Text carries everything people read, with Black caps for headlines and Light or Regular for body copy.

The b travels on its own as an app icon, a sticker and a tone-on-tone pattern on the back of every navy card and envelope.

• NAVY
• ORANGE
• SKY BLUE
• WHITE

The paper system keeps the full logo on white sheets and puts the b to work on the backs: orange on navy, over a tone-on-tone b pattern. The same parts cover letterhead, business cards, envelopes, a presentation folder and a set of stickers.

A thin orange rule and a navy footer bar carry the system from paper into Keynote and PowerPoint, so every presentation looks like it came from the same place.

Presentation templates open on navy with the logo, or on the signature image, and move into white content slides with the orange rule and the navy footer bar. On Twitter, the same image leads the cover and the b holds the avatar.

It’s always rewarding to see the system at work. At conferences, the banner leads with the signature image and the three pillars, and the booth, apparel, bags and drinkware all carry the b. The outreach van, shared with Stanford Medicine, visits schools to test kids, so it gives both names equal billing and lets a big photo do the talking.