Stella Rebrand
Role: Art Director + Senior Graphic Designer
Client: Stella
The Challenge
When I joined Stella Mental Health, the company was growing fast and the brand couldn't keep up. A logo existed, but there was no system behind it. No consistent type treatment, no visual language that could scale across the channels we needed: paid social, patient education materials, doctor-facing collateral, investor presentations, website, and more.
The core design problem was unusually hard: Stella treats conditions like depression, anxiety, PTSD, and long COVID using medical interventions but had no product photography, no physical locations, and no existing visual assets to draw from. Everything had to be built from scratch. The brand needed to feel simultaneously medical and trustworthy, warm and approachable, and scientifically credible without being clinical or cold.
*above animation by Gianni Arone, art directed by me.
My Approach
I rebuilt the brand system in real time while continuing to support day-to-day design needs. Starting from the existing logo, I developed a full visual language: a refined color system, a typographic hierarchy that could work across digital and print, a custom illustration style, and a set of modular layout principles that gave the brand flexibility without losing cohesion.
I documented everything into a living brand guide that could be handed off to contractors and junior designers, and updated it continuously as the brand evolved across new channels and product launches.
Before: The brand was one dimensional, text was hard to read, and couldn’t easily expand in an interesting way into all the assets we would end up needing.
The Result
The new system was rolled out across every patient and partner touchpoint: ads, social, email campaigns, printed one-sheets, the website, and internal presentations. The brand went from visually inconsistent and hard to extend, to a cohesive system that could scale with the company. I art directed all photography and illustration, and collaborated with motion designers to bring key brand moments to life in video and animation.
^ video above layout and illustrations by myself + jr designer, animation by Adrian