Over the summer of 2022, I had the pleasure of interning for Cured Health’s marketing and design team. Cured is a health-tech company that aims to better connect patient/provider communication through their marketing and CRM platform.
I was able to work on a wide variety of projects, like creating illustrations and social media posts, uploading web blogs, and creating the company’s brand guide.
Below is an overview of most of the work I completed with Cured.
brand guide (capstone)
Creating Cured's brand guide was my capstone project during my internship. Their branding shifted considerably over the last few months, and with this, new guidelines were needed in order to keep these changes consistent. This project took about 2 months to complete and I learned so much about branding and design in the process.
Below is an overview of the project steps, timeline, and insights!
1. Research
The first step in creating the guide was researching other companies' brand guides, and a lot of my research focused on other health-tech companies to see what they chose to include and how. This step also included internal interviews with multiple employees from different departments to determine what their needs were in regards to Cured's design and what would help them going forward. Their feedback was taken into consideration, I created a list of goals, and I moved on to the next step.
2. Layout Testing
With the help of my team, we created a tentative outline of what sections should be included in the guide. This allowed me to start building some initial layouts for the brand guide. I started with one section and spent a lot of time coming up with new ideas until finally something clicked. This new layout was clean, simple, and user-friendly-- All things that Cured wanted their brand to convey moving forward. This general layout was approved and I was able to move on to the build-out stage.
3. Build-out
About a month was spent building out the brand guide. This consisted of laying out the information and making it digestible, rearranging page order to make it flow, and many other tweaks and adjustments to make sure that everything looked clean and consistent. My team gave me guidance and advice as the project rolled along, and by the end of my internship, the brand guide was in a place that I was very happy with as we looked forward to enablement.
4. Enablement
The brand guide was completed, announced to employees, and became available for internal use. This marked the end of my internship with Cured Health.
illustrations
Illustrations were another large part of my work at Cured. Having never done vector illustrations like these before, this was a learning curve but it was also one of my favorite parts of the internship. I made a variety of illustrations, and above are some to note. Some of the illustrations were just me taking the brand's old illustrations and remaking them in the newer style, which was more clean and simple.
I also had the honor of re-making Cured's homepage image, which is pictured to the right.
social media assets
Cured wanted new social media banners for different mediums (LinkedIn, Twitter, etc.). I came up with a few different layouts and made new illustrations and icons for them. The 4 banners above were my final versions, and the green banner is ultimately the one that was chosen for the company's social media.
I also made different kinds of social media posts. Cured needed a new layout for new hire introduction posts, so I made a template (pictured bottom left) that incorporated their organic shapes in a new way and fit their social media feed. Other posts I made were graphics promoting blogs on the Cured website.
google theme
This Google theme deck is a project that I got to completely own as well. Being such a deck-heavy company, there was a need for new layouts and backgrounds so that every presentation did not look the same. I was tasked with creating 20 - 30 new template slides that would be available for employees to use for their own decks. In Figma, I created layouts using brand elements and colors, making sure that there was a variety in appearances to fit different needs.
After creating the backgrounds in Figma, I created a Google Slide document and added stylized placeholders on the backgrounds for the headers, sub-headers, and body text. After a lot of tweaking, the deck was ready for employees to copy layouts and use them for their own purposes, with little-to-no manipulation needed on their parts.
insights & closing thoughts
Working with Cured Health was a very valuable experience for me. It was my first time working with a startup, which on its own presented a lot of challenges, benefits, and nuance.
From the very first day, I truly felt like a member of the team. My opinion was always valued and asked for, even for projects I had no part in. I was given a lot of freedom to experiment which was extremely intimidating at first. I'm used to being given strict guidelines and deadlines for projects, but as they were still defining their brand, I was given the opportunity to try things out and make a lasting impact on the company.
I also appreciate that even though I was only an intern, my team did not hesitate to entrust large projects to me. Being able to design a company's brand guide was a dream come true. It's not an easy project and it takes a lot of time to complete, so I'm glad they felt comfortable handing this project to me.
There was a large sense of community at Cured which I really appreciated. Work was important, but taking breaks and making connections was also important. I loved connecting with my intern class and spending time reaching out to employees in the company who all had an open-door policy.
Overall, my time with Cured Health is not something I will be forgetting soon. It gave me such a big leg-up with my graphic design and I learned a lot, which I am so thankful for, and I can't wait to apply this knowledge to my future opportunities!
Software used: Adobe Illustrator, Figma, Webflow, Jira
