EMIL JARFELt

Encounter House of Psychology

Encounter is a psychology house consisting of carefully selected, experienced psychologists. It functions as one unified house with solid cooperation between its departments in Denmark. Encounter creates the optimal framework for their psychologists to spar with each other, exchange knowledge, and strengthen their expertise. This means that the customer receives the best possible therapy.

The Challenge

A full-service rebrand of an established, prominent organization in the education space; redeveloping their branding and enhancing the brand recognition; while bringing their identity, website, and services into the future.

The Outcome

Comprehensive new brand identity, website design and professional learning system. Completely reimagined service design, connecting the new digital offering with the internal stakeholders. Significant increases to engagement, website traffic and qualitative improvements to brand recognition and user experience.

Delivered

Strategy
Branding
Identity Design
Service Design
Messaging

Year

2021

The starting point

Encounter, an esteemed and established institution, had an identity and a website that had not evolved in tandem with its business growth. The existing logo lacked variation and meaning. Furthermore, the website was antiquated and provided no real means for stakeholders to engage. In order to address these shortcomings, I was enlisted to spearhead the project. Despite a limited budget, I embarked on the challenge of creating a completely new identity.

A fresh start

The branding preserves certain aspects of their existing identity but rejuvenated them to represent their modernized persona - vibrant, captivating, and up-to-date. The messaging's clarity was a crucial aspect, resulting in a design that emphasizes recognition over intricacy. This streamlined approach is aimed at enhancing the overall impact of the brand.

Old Logotype

New Logotype

“A logo doesn’t sell (directly), it identifies.” Paul Rand

Primary Logo

Icon

A playful touch

In line with Encounter's established strategy, we prioritized clear messaging to build brand recognition. To add a playful touch to therapy, we introduced a creative twist on the Brand Stamp, creating a valuable asset. This unique adaptation enhances Encounter's brand identity, fostering a more approachable and relatable image. The Brand Stamp variation serves as a recognizable symbol, capturing attention and conveying emotion, ultimately establishing the brand as a leader in the field.

Establishing an identity

A brand guidelines document serves as the north star for an organization, guiding communications internally and externally. The guidelines provide a clear framework for approaching future communications and explain in detail the key considerations of the brand identity system.

A website built for its clients

The website is designed with the user's needs in mind, making it easy for them to explore and find the courses they're interested in. I started by planning how the website would be organized, creating clear maps, and structuring the information accordingly. From there, I quickly moved on to creating Lo-Fi designs that allowed me to test and gather feedback from the users. Once the stakeholders were satisfied with the designs, I finalized the Figma files. After that, I worked closely with the stakeholders to bring the website to life using Webflow.

A core strategy for the website was to take a relatively complex collection of information and reduce it to its simplest form. I quickly identified in the discovery phase that our target audience was often unfamiliar with the technology and that we needed to shape our engagement around this.

Establishing an intuitive user experience for members allows our key stakeholders to quickly understand our technology and find the resources they need.

Putting it all together

Once the branding, messaging, website, and templates were in place, it was clear that we needed to bridge the gap between the internal and external stakeholders engaging with the new systems; this is where service design came in. After running extensive discovery sessions, stakeholder interviews, and reviews of the existing processes, we had established a clear picture of the areas that needed attention.

The service design phase included the initial discovery, further research, mapping out service blueprints and prototyping with stakeholders. Finally, a new service blueprint was in place. After stakeholder training we commenced implementation across the organisation.

Through technology, software and automation, we were able to streamline processes. By improving existing communication strategies internally and optimising collaboration, we eliminated double handling of tasks and improved engagement internally and externally.

Credits

Thank you to the team at Encounter, especially Neela and Rasmus for the collaboration and cooperation that has enabled this work.

Client

Encounter

Collaborators

Encounter Marketing Team

Fonts

Gotham Font Family
Inter Font Family

Technology

Adobe Creative Suite
Figma & Figjam
Notion
Webflow
Miro