Services · Branding
A patient decides whether to trust you before they read a word
They are being asked to take an experimental medicine from people they have never met. The flyer in the waiting room, the sign on the door and the first screen on their phone all answer the same question: are these people serious. Branding is how that question gets answered before anyone speaks.
Four weeks. Alongside the website build, or on its own.
- Positioning, written down in one paragraph
- Logo and mark, screen and print formats
- Colour and type, contrast checked
- Photography direction for your site and team
- Flyer, referral card, capability sheet, slides
- A brand guide short enough to be used
The problem
Most research sites look like a form, not a place
The identity was usually inherited: a mark drawn once by a relative of the founding investigator, a blue nobody chose, and a flyer built in Word the week before a study opened. It is not that it looks dated. It is that it reads as improvised, and patients are deciding whether to hand you their health.
Sponsors read the same signals in a different room. A capability sheet that matches your website, which matches your signage, says a site runs on process. Four versions of your own logo in one packet says the opposite, whatever your enrollment numbers show.
Branding here is not decoration. It is making one impression happen in every place a patient or a sponsor meets you, so nobody has to wonder which version is the real one.
What you get
Six things, and all of them get used
No fifty-page deck of moodboards. Every piece below exists because a coordinator, a printer or a sponsor will open it.
Positioning in one paragraph
Who you are for, which therapeutic areas you own, and what a sponsor should remember after five minutes on your website. Written first, because a logo cannot rescue an unclear answer.
Logo and mark
A wordmark that holds up at 24 pixels on a phone and on a clinic door. Delivered in SVG, PNG and print formats, with clear space and minimum size written down so it survives the next person who uses it.
Colour and type system
Chosen for contrast first. Every text pairing is checked against WCAG 2.2 AA before it is approved, so the palette does not have to be undone during the website build.
Photography direction
What to shoot, what to avoid, and how to photograph your team and your building so a patient recognises the place when they pull into the car park. The stock stethoscope is retired.
Patient and sponsor templates
Capability one-pager, study flyer, referral card and a slide template, built so your coordinators can fill them in without breaking the layout.
A brand guide people read
Around twenty pages, not two hundred. Enough for a printer, a sponsor design team and whoever updates the website after we have gone.
Process
Four weeks, two directions, one system
Read
We read your current materials, your competitors and the last two feasibility packets you sent. One session with you on positioning and who you want to be known for.
Two directions
Two routes, each shown on the things that matter: a study flyer, a phone screen, a capability page and a door sign. Not a logo on a white slide.
System
The chosen route becomes a system. Colour, type, spacing, imagery, and the templates your team will actually open.
Handover
Files, templates and a short guide, plus a walkthrough recorded for whoever inherits it. If the website is running with it, the system goes straight into the build.
Run alongside a website build, weeks one to four sit inside the same eight weeks rather than adding to them.
Scope
What this is not
Not a hospital system rebrand
If you sit inside a larger health system, we work within their rules and build the research site identity that lives alongside it.
Not a logo on its own
A mark with nothing behind it changes nothing. The system, the templates and the writing are the part that shows up in front of patients and sponsors.
Not a campaign identity
Study-specific recruitment artwork is a different job, and usually a smaller one. We can do it, but it is quoted separately.
Naming only if you ask
Naming and a domain check make sense when a site is splitting from a health system or merging with another. Say so early, because it changes the timeline.
Questions
Can we keep our current logo?
Often that is the right answer, and we will say so. We rebuild the system around it: colour, type, imagery and templates. If the logo is genuinely working against you, we will show you why rather than assert it.
What does it cost?
Branding is quoted with the website when the two run together, which is the cheaper way to do it, and separately when it does not. Tell us which materials you need and you will have a number in the same email.
Do we have to redo the website at the same time?
No. But a brand decided during the build saves a second round of production, so if both are on your list this year, do them together.
Will IRB have to approve the new look?
The look, no. The wording on recruitment materials, yes, as always. We deliver templates that keep artwork and approved wording separate, so a copy change does not restart a review.
Who owns the files?
You do, outright, including editable source files. No licence, no retainer, nothing to keep paying for in order to keep using your own identity.
What if a sponsor requires their own branding on our materials?
Most do, on study-specific pieces. The system is built with that in mind: your identity holds the page, their logo sits where their rules require it, and neither looks bolted on.
Send us the last flyer you printed
We will tell you what a patient reads in it, and whether the problem is the design or the words. Nothing attached to it.
Or write to info@trialsfocus.com. We take a small number of projects at a time and reply within two working days.