Trusted Visual Identity for Nuffield Health Hospital Content

  • Nuffield Health produces a growing volume of hospital-based video content for YouTube, featuring clinicians, patient information, and service explainers. The content needed a clear, recognisable visual identity that felt trustworthy, calm, and clinically appropriate, while still being engaging on a consumer platform.

  • I started with competitor benchmarking to understand how hospital and healthcare brands present video content on YouTube.

    Common themes emerged around:

    • Visual simplicity

    • Cool, calming colour palettes

    • The use of imagery and illustration to support understanding of sensitive topics

    These insights shaped a visual direction that prioritised clarity, approachability, and trust.

  • I explored and presented a range of visual directions to the Nuffield Health video team, testing different looks for hospital YouTube content. Brand constraints, such as limits on colour overlays, shaped some decisions, but I found solutions that preserved both visual impact and brand integrity.

    This included adapting stock illustrations to the brand palette and using scientific imagery unaltered to maintain credibility. Through collaboration and iteration, this process produced a cohesive, well-formed visual concept that balanced creativity, clarity, and brand governance.

Research

Working in collaboration with the video team, I explored three initial visual directions: a safe option, a more expressive option, and a middle-ground approach that balanced innovation with brand constraints.

Presenting these options early allowed for productive conversations around tone, trust, and suitability for hospital-led content, shaping the final direction.

First round of design ideas

Safe approach

Expressive approach

Middle-ground approach

Developing the visual identity

After initial concept presentations, I continued experimenting with stock imagery and illustration to refine the visual language and move closer to the final design direction.

At the request of the video team, I also integrated 3D models to support the planned ACL content, ensuring that visuals could clearly communicate anatomical and clinical information. This stage was highly iterative, balancing creativity with technical requirements and brand constraints to create visuals that were both accurate and engaging.

Outcome

Ultimately, while not all explored design ideas were used in the final videos, the design vision I developed was integral to creating a clear, cohesive visual system for Nuffield Health’s hospital content.

This system guided the treatment of imagery, illustration, and 3D elements across the series, ensuring that visuals supported clinical accuracy, patient understanding, and brand consistency.

The result was a highly engaging ACL video series that outperformed typical channel performance, reaching over 145k views, significantly above the channel’s average. By establishing a reusable visual approach, the project also provided a framework for future hospital video content, enabling consistency, clarity, and audience trust across the channel.