Patches Brand Study

Patches is a fictional veterinarian clinic created by my Design Systems class I took at Thomas More University. It is based off of a real veterinarian clinic in Cincinnati and is where we got a lot of inspiration from when designing the branding suite for the company. Our designs weren’t given to the actual vet, we just used them as inspiration. Patches was created somewhat collaboratively, the entire class put their input in on the name of the company and the general feeling we wanted to convey with our branding, which ultimately ended up being a safe, friendly, and trustworthy company. I also had this class at the same time I was taking UX/UI at TMU, so I created the Patches website concurrently with developing the branding! You can read about that here. These are the designs I created for it!

I begun by creating the logo to represent Patches. This was probably the longest it took me to develop a logo - I wanted to make it feel just right, being able to walk the line between “friendly” without appearing “careless”; “safe” without feeling “sterile”; “minimalist” without being “boring”. You can see the process I went through in this document, but to cut to the very end, this is what I ended up with! The free flowing shapes and bright colors are friendly, but they coloring is not too far out of the lines to suggest a sloppy or indifferent company.

From there, we moved on to creating other business related items for Patches such as business cards, envelopes, forms, and other items. These followed with the pre-existing branding to create some new, but adjacent designs. The business cards and envelopes are very stylized and designed with multiple different motifs to remind the viewer that these belong to the Patches brand. For the forms, on the other hand, it was more important to preserve readability and clarity for medical documentation.

We also branched out to creating brochures, banners, and even merchandise. These were made with the intention of advertising to potential new customers and showing off the various services provided by Patches. The merchandise was a bonus, different items owners could by for their pets.