If you’ve never worked with professional designers, I highly recommend it. I’ve used a service that sort of commoditizes Design, but nevertheless, I get pros competing with their example designs, for my sole subjective taste and ultimate selection. I’ve done it twice now: once for Qualitative Research Shop, LLC and once for the blog logo you see here.

The fun part for me is looking through the different visualizations of the creative brief. If you’ve written it well, your values, goals, and aspirations for the brand will magically be conveyed through the visuals, and of course, the actions of your brand, which is visually represented in the logo.

In this case, HealthScare-in-America, I chose the universal symbol for the tech-power-on-button, combined with a pill image both because I was addicted to my work, in high-tech consumer research, and my tech, my many devices and habits for a while there, and because of the rampant and widespread tendency in America to over prescribe any sort of medication for any sort of ailment. We are quick to medicate, not just with medicine either. When our House of Representatives introduced the H.R. 2917 The Opioid Crisis Accountability Act of 2019 in the 116th Congress (2019-2020) I was a bit angered that we have to admonish and patrol this kind of “dubious marketing” in the way of over-prescribing and highly target marketing, of a pained, vulnerable population. But it’s not a new problem in America, (cigarettes are just the first industry to come to mind, but not the only) and I guess judging by this legislature, it’s just worse than ever before.

And my blog, well it’s about so much more than what’s happening to everyone else, it’s about what’s happened and happening to me, so the logo reflects the conflation of just prescribing, numbing by staying busy, constantly powering on – as a way of coping. The title – HealthScare – is about how scary the whole enterprise of making profit off of medicine and medical care really is. The system has long been broken in America, everyone knows it – and I am not educated enough on the topic, I only have an end-user’s perspective, which is jaded and cynical, and operating from a base of fear more often than I care to admit.