Self Care Library: Mental Health Series
Towards the end of last year I had the great opportunity to start work on Push Doctors very own line of Self Care booklets. This library is available to anyone who needs it, but are also prescribed by doctors to patients with the conditions. It was decided that we would start with one of the most commonly diagnosed conditions — mental health, and start by focusing on depression. Depression is one of the most prominent mental health disorders worldwide, and we wanted to start with the booklet that was going to help the most people possible.
In our modern day and age, everyone seems to be switched on all the time, depression is on the rise and is something that many people are able to empathise with, having been a suffer themselves or having someone close to them dealing with the symptoms. Getting the design balance between informative, helpful and supportive was a hugely important task for me and I was keen to get started. Below I’ll outline the steps I took to ensure I got the design right from initial briefing to final design.
01.
The first step to begin any design process begins with a brief. The best way to receive a brief is in person, as it gives you a chance to ask any questions you may have there and then, and you can discuss the project with the client. As I work in-house at Push Doctor, my ‘clients’ were the marketing team and one of our in-house doctors, with the actual end client being the patients receiving the booklet.
This project was definitely a group effort with Jonny Edge re-writing and editing the enormous amount of copy involved and Dr Tom Micklewright, who helped review all the content from a medical stand point.
02.
Once I had everything I needed for the brief, I went away and started my ideation — the best way that works for me is word mapping, where I’ll do a general ‘brain-dump’ of all the words I can think of associated to the topic, in this case, mental health, and finally review the words, picking out and highlighting the ones that spark specific visual ideas and concepts. Occasionally if nothing jumps out from the first word map, I’ll do a couple more based on other related words and then follow the process of Design, Describe, Visualise, where you take a keyword, find related words and then draw small scribbles that visually represent them.
03.
Once I have my keywords, concepts generally begin to form themselves in my head, be it visual or in the form of a ‘hashtag idea’, which is just a way of putting your concept into a short snappy line, to help you sell it back to the client. I came up with three different design concepts under one main idea to present back to the marketing team, alongside some mood boards to help evoke visual ideas from both sides, which can be seen in the images below.
04.
I pitched my initial ideas and received a good response. This then led into a really effective feedback session, where we collaborated to explore the ideas more, as we decided we actually liked elements from two of the ideas.
The concept we found fit the brief best turned out to be ‘adapt at your own pace’. This is based around the idea of rebuilding yourself at your own speed and learning how to adapt your thinking to suit your life, and not the other way around. This idea quickly prompted the idea of a jigsaw puzzle for me, and I began the next stage of the process, thumbnails, where I sketch out as many designs as I can based on the design concept. Above are two pages of my thumbnails, purely based on just the cover design, as I felt once I had this nailed down, it would prompt my designs for the inside content of the booklet, which it did! I sent these thumbnails onto the marketing team and they responded with their favourite designs, and finally we agreed on pursuing two or three designs through to the digital stage.
05.
Once I took to the computer to bring my designs ‘to life’ it became clear which ones worked and which definitely didn’t. The idea of a simple circle worked well for this concept of ‘putting yourself back together’ and feeling like yourself again. So once I felt confident in this design, I pitched it back to the marketing team and my managers in the design team. This is usually one of my favourite steps in the design process, as when you feel you’ve hit a wall or completed a design, your peers will find a new way of looking at it, or ways to help you push your design thinking and how you can improve it. This is exactly what happened with the cover, and you can see from the image below, how the design developed and grew. Mental health isn’t as simple as just a line or a circle, there’s so many elements to it, so I used the idea of collaborating different geometric patterns together, to show a formed shape, made up of different elements.
06.
Once the cover was complete, I moved onto the content pages. The design for these was much easier as I had the visual prompt from the cover. I only did a few sketches for this one, as there ended up being over 40 pages to the booklet, but the general idea was that scattered shapes from a circle would end up forming the whole shape at the end of the booklet — once again representing and backing up the initial design concept.
07.
The last stage before the project could be considered finished was to have all the content inside reviewed about three times by Jonny, and have a final design review with my manager, Jess and our then head of Design, Sab ( we did have a couple others of these during the process!).
And then it’s complete!
The whole process (re-writing the copy, medical reviews, designing and more reviews) took roughly four months in total. We had three of our in-house doctors read and sign off the document at the end, which we included in the booklet, so patients knew it was medically certified.
This is currently available as a digital PDF file, but I took the time to mock up a couple of pages in printed booklet form, which I’ve included below.
If you want to check out the whole document or learn more about how to deal with depression, you can find it here: https://www.pushdoctor.co.uk/what-we-treat/mental-health/depression
