Humanly

The felt experience of cancer treatment can feel complicated, overwhelming and prescriptive — whether recently diagnosed or many years past treatment, patients are bombarded with messages telling them how they should act, feel and live: Be a survivor. Live strong. F--k cancer. Based on a real need we heard from the community, we defined a brand, Humanly, that aims to give patients space to be themselves, with content that is receptive, real, and illuminating. With these as our values, we built a holistic brand that can cut across culture, business, content, and design.

Growing directly from our brand values, we developed a flexible brand system built on three design principles: organic, expressive, and spacious. The soft color palette and generous use of white space creates a soothing, open environment; the system of organic shapes evokes a coherent community that’s made up of unique individuals; photography and illustrations celebrate a diverse range of real people and their lives; and the type system enables a wide range of tonal possibilities by combining a rounded sans-serif, Matter, with a sharp editorial serif, Domaine.

Celebrating humanity means not shying away from those aspects of ourselves that might be less than perfect. The calligraphic, bold, all-caps wordmark may not seem the obvious choice at first for a brand that otherwise leans on a soft color palette and system of organic shapes; but the inherent contrast projects a form of strength, while also emphasizing the unique, purposefully-imperfect shape of the “U.” 

These anecdotes are grouped and presented to users in a variety of ways that encourage immersion and exploration. The majority of them are aural experiences, intended to be listened to in succession while one goes about one’s day. Each anecdote is tagged so that users searching for a specific topic, such as hair loss or sharing news with family, are able to quickly find relevant results, and can listen to these results together like a playlist. The Humanly team can also curate their own Playlists around specific topics like Holidays and Friends, each of which gets a unique treatment and can be easily shared. 

The concept for the first Humanly product, “Our Story,” likewise grew directly out of our positioning of being receptive, illuminating, and real. We created a true platform, in the literal sense of the word — a product that elevates the voices of the community with as little interference as possible. An immersive, intuitive interface pulls from a database of bitesize anecdotes, taken directly from interviews with members of the community and recorded in their own voices. The ultimate goal is to foster community: members can create accounts, reach out to one another, get involved and share their own stories and resources directly through the platform.