Announcing Kara | meeting cancer with mindfulness
We are delighted to introduce Kara, a project which we are making in partnership with UPMC CancerCenter.
Kara is the first project we have made with a partner organisation and we’re very proud to be working with UPMC CancerCenter. In particular we are working with their specialist Integrative Oncology team which provides people with access to a range of therapies and treatments in support of their patient journey.
While Kara will be available to UPMC CancerCenter patients, as a mobile-optimised website it will also be generally available to anyone who would like to use it. We will share more information about the specifics of the project in due course but for this first post we’d like to explain the name.
As part of our initial design work with the Integrative Oncology team, we became interested in which of the qualities that mindfulness training can help develop were the most important for cancer patients to deal with what can of course be a very challenging time. The main four that emerged from this process were: kindness to oneself and to others, self-awareness, the ability to rest when you need to rest and the ability to allow things to be as they are even if they are difficult. When we looked at the one-word versions of these qualities: kindness, awareness, rest and allowing we noticed that they spelt out Kara and it was too great of a coincidence that we realised it would make the ideal name.
The first version of Kara that we launch will contain a range of guided meditations and reflections but sitting underneath all of them is this emphasis on these four core qualities of kindness, awareness, rest and allowing. The name therefore also acts a lovely short-hand for what is important. The name also has two other benefits of it being a name which brings it a bit of personality and also echoing the word care which is so important since Kara is effectively all about self-care.
Once we had the name, the identity then followed. The core identity (as designed by Rydo) as you can see here is made up of two elements, the diamond/kite shape represents the four qualities and will play an important role in the user interface. And the wordmark is set in Soleil which is the font we shall be using across the site for its good legibility and geometric, contemporary style.
Kara will launch this summer and if you’d like to know when it is live, do sign up to an email alert. In the meantime here is a sense of our colour palette.
Originally published at www.mindfulnesseverywhere.io.
