ROLE: Creative Content Lead
For our final chapter of this 3-part book of branding with the NWPA, I was fortunate enough to be one of the people involved in the Glacier Scalp Cooling project. This revolutionary technology was recently created in order to help chemo patients deal with alopecia—loss of hair. Scalp cooling, also known as cold cap therapy, is a method used to reduce hair loss during chemotherapy treatment. The cap reduces blood flow to the hair follicles, which in turn assists in the reduction of the amount of chemotherapy drugs that reach the follicles, thus reducing the damage to the hair cells and the resulting hair loss.
This chapter has been wild. The company has taken so many leaps and bounds, and has additionally fallen through many hurdles while we have developed this brand. Right smack dab in the middle of this project came the rise of AI, which also ended up being pretty crucial for some of our concepts (to discuss below).
Beyond starting with nearly no media assets at all, this project was challenged in how we ultimately never did see the product in its finished form due to a pending patent. Instead, we worked with the idea of it being some weird backpack thing.
yeah, I know, what?
Designing like this obviously means that the direction for creative aspects ultimately comes down to us, which is a great lesson for all of us at the Beehive, but also this opens up opportunities for so much other stress.
The only logo that we did have to work from was this:
We will delve into the “glacier” logo depicted here later, but for now, how do we hit the mark with the challenges at hand?
The Task:
- Develop the brand
- Design the Logo
- Create the website
- Design the Business Cards
I. The Brainstorm + Research
Our design team wanted to ensure that we hit this client hard with plenty of research invested. We knew there’d be a lot of explaining to the client on some things, but that only makes us grow as well.
First thing’s first: Let’s define a glacier:
A glacier is a large, perennial accumulation of crystalline ice, snow, rock, sediment, and often liquid water that originates on land and moves down slope under the influence of its own weight and gravity.
This is obviously different from an iceberg, which loosely is defined as similar to a glacier, but actually a chip off the ol’ block itself.
…and with that being said, it’s very important that we are not using an iceberg because it’ll be a completely incorrect depiction of the glacier, silly.
But there’s something that’s been bothering me… I swear I’ve heard of scalp cooling before…
I was totally actually watching Breaking Bad right at around the golden time the time we picked up this client, so it actually gave me a sigh of relief in knowing that the concept wasn’t so new that it’s never been done before. Glacier Scalp Cooling just does it better, basically. By achieving mobility and a sense of discretion, this device actually allows chemo patients to not feel limited to a chair or anything.
With this concept still being so relatively new, the competition or similar are fairly limited:
Upon moving forward in our brainstorming components, we also picked out some key words to develop our ideas out further:
From the keywords depicted above, I ended up thinking of this company as “Innovative, Dependable, Established, Collected, and Concise”. My initial (and personal) idea with these keywords was to take this company in a similar aesthetic revolving around the idea of ingenuity, technology, and science.
II. The Stylescape
Alongside this initial concept, I actually began to develop several of these images using machine learning prompts and DREAM II by Wombo:
- - - - - - **I did this in code because it looks cool and techy** - - - - - -
PROMPT:
A scientific electron microscope image of hair follicles
with precise features. For the mountains, I wanted something ambiguous and unrecognizable, and so I used this prompt:
PROMPT:
A National Geographic image of a great mountain peak frozen solid
with extreme detail from below; taken with a Fujifilm GFX-100S, 500mm f/3.8,
…to which they were really not about the idea of using Artificial Intelligence—go figure. It doesn’t surprise me, considering that this new type of technology is ethically under a lot of discretion, but it is what it is. This new design for the relatively new scalp cooling tech industry would have definitely set them set apart from the competition… so that was the grand idea we eventually were able to get a little bit of footing with, to some extent.
Other ai generations of hair:
After our feedback, we had three designs pushed forward, as seen below:
From these designs, they really liked the idea of the gradient from the bottom stylescape, the hair and imagery from the top stylescape, and the overall layout of the middle stylescape, which led to the combination of these as such:
III: The Logo Sketches
Once again, the direction for this project was particularly precarious, considering we didn’t really have the means necessary to develop them into what we’re seeing here. I think the closest direction we wanted initially began with Paxman, but based on the feedback from the artificial intelligence, we knew the client wanted less science and much more patient-focus.
Their old logo had some pretty hard edges, and so we thought initially to keep that angularity. Considering we wanted to make something that was a spiritual successor to their old logo, it was important to consider how those sharp edges played into the branding.
a. First Sketches:
So fontwise, I wanted to go a bit edgy with it.
Although the mass majority of our team was focused on softer edges, and colors, I opted to incorporate something that had angular and strong; something that I think should make sense for how we’d want the patients to be.
b. Revisions + Digitization Drafts:
C: Chosen revisions:
D: Final Logo:
…and now the website.
IV: The Website
a. Planning
Planning this website was a doozy, to say the least. We had nothing to go off of—and I mean nothing. No images, no body content… nothing. Building it up was revolved around careful planning to handle a website like this, with more content being available in time. Because of this, we needed to do a lot of tactical planning.
Chris ended up helping us out so much in building content, so most of this was what was given to us in a couple of powerpoints.
AI ended up being used to assist in generating some of the imagery, considering we do not have the means to even look at the product as a whole (thanks to the patent). This irked our client, but overall I think he understood that he could use the poses to his advantage when they get actual photography in there—to which it’s as easy as plugging it in and going.
PROMPT FOR MIDJOURNEY: a smiling chemo patient stands in a hospital
wearing a backpack that connects to a scalp cooling cap that tightly
fits on the head with a chinstrap; a backpack medical device for
chemo worn by a bald human with a cooling cap on --ar 16:9 --s 200 --v 5The rest of the team spent their time building assets as much as they could with icons, body copy, and even motion design scripts (thanks Brayon).
Before getting started with the structure, we looked at the skeleton and developed the site with these key focal points in mind.
b. Structure
The structural aspects of this website were somewhat odd—how do we make a website with the little content we had expand out to entire areas?
The answer: we build a single-page website.
We spent several hours together one day just jotting down the different ways this website could be laid out, but eventually came to a conclusion that the website must be concise and not span too long.
c. The Website Design (and its challenges)
Working in webflow was actually intially very easy and quite rewarding. It has its quirks, sure, but we didn’t have too much trouble once the design started coming along. Imagine a snowball on top of a hill that rolls and builds mass + momentum. That basically was what we planned and executed. As our Design Lead (Alana) was leading our management, I was spearheading the website.
d. The Motion Design
Our motion design was created with the idea of something similar to that of the Playstation’s interactive background elements that they have on their console menu screens:
Although this idea was scrapped due to some failures in our exporting of JSON files (particles don’t like javascript it seems), we ended up using the concept of “particles” pretty loosely and found an alternative that was able to be coded in with no major issues.
e. Responsive Design (and its dilemmas)
The amount of headaches that ensued while in the process of making this responsive is insurmountable, considering that I am still hefty with this headache.
Bottomline, I hate responsive design and all of its components. Up until the very last step, we had no issues with the website, but then out of nowhere, the website got finnicky. It is just on the designer, but it’s something strange that keeps occurring: the website gives me limited access restrictions and sends out an error code 5 message to me:
f. Conclusion
In conclusion, our clients were most impressed and quite happy, regardless of the hiccups experienced with responsive design.
This experience was phenomenal for me as a designer personally—I got to direct a team of people to make art for me to pump out for something in a way similar to that of a creative director. Although I was not the leader in this project, I believe that Alana’s professionalism and her position as leader was great. She was instrumental in keeping the flow of our team’s success.
This project was probably the biggest (and baddest) client I’ve dealt with in Beehive. It nearly broke me with the website. I was pulling my hair stressed out at how ridiculous it was getting, but in the end, the few from my team (who I’ll shout out to in their reviews) helped greatly.
I couldn’t have asked for a better team (mainly).
