NOTE: See Step 2 of the brand project here.

We are asking designers to consider participating in an open-source effort to create a brand for Simple. Please see this post on Medium for the background of this not-for-profit project. Thank you so much to everyone who participates.

The creative brief for Simple

Great brands often begin with one clearly articulated statement. What makes the "Simple" project different from any other project like it? For us, this all starts with the idea of radical simplicity:

Simple is a simple, reliable, easy-to-use app to track patients with high blood pressure.

Most other software that healthcare workers use is complicated and hard to learn. Our aim is to be a breath of fresh air  — an app that's simple, which nurses and doctors actually like to use.

Brand personality

Think of the brand like your favorite nurse: smart, insightful, careful with your privacy, and treats you as a human being. The brand isn't goofy, corporate, aloof, or complicated.

The audience for the brand

1. Nurses, doctors, and other healthcare workers
2. Health administrators
3. Patients

This software will be deployed all over the world, starting in India, so take cultural considerations into account.

Common touch points

• Mobile apps: The brand has to work very well for mobile operating system icons and in-app placement. (See screenshots of the app in progress).
• App Store: The brand should be immediately recognizable in the Google Play Store or other app store.
• Website: simple.org 
• 3D renders: We may make a physical trophy for great clinics. An amazing identity would lend itself well to 3D renders.
• Media and animations: In the future, we may do training videos and add animations to the app. A brand that lends itself to animations would be useful.

The brand will sometimes be used in low quality one-color physical prints (e.g. a training manual), so keep your design simple and unfussy. Really thin lines or gradients might be hard to reproduce.

Foundations of community

• You are giving your work away willingly: In other words, this is a volunteer effort. You are sharing your design work for others to modify and use.
• We all design together: By participating, you are allowing others to build on, remix, modify, and otherwise change your work.
• You may not get credit: We will try to give credit where credit is due, but this may be a messy collaboration where many people riff and build on each other's ideas.
• Be positive, critique with an open heart: Please be supportive and don't make your comments personal. This is a great article on how to give constructive design feedback.
• We value and seek diverse engagement: We actively encourage participation from designers from all over the world. We should make everyone feel welcome in this project.
• There will be art direction: Input from everyone will be crucial to choose an identity that matches the brief, but this is not design-by-committee. In the end, our team will select the brand that best fits the project.

We wrote these foundational statements based on discussions with designers who work in open-source. Don't agree with the statements? Think something is missing? Let's discuss in the comments on Medium!

How to participate

1. Share your brand ideas below on GitHub. A GitHub "issue" can work like a discussion board. Just add a comment at the bottom and add a PNG or JPG of your idea. If you're willing, also include your source files as a link so others can easily riff on your concept. Please explicitly add a "Copyright: CC0" to your submissions.
2. On GitHub, provide feedback on other people's submissions. Not sure how to give constructive feedback? Read this article.
3. In addition to GitHub, feel free to post your ideas on Twitter, Dribbble, and Facebook with the hashtag #simpleapp.

We asked several designers to take the lead on critique. When you submit your ideas, you will likely receive feedback from:

• Juhi Metra, prev head of design at Zomato
• Mike Davidson, prev VP of design at Twitter
• Dhruv Saxena, design partner at Uncommon.is
• Gabriel Valdivia, design at Jigsaw/Google
• Meg Robichaud, illustrator at Lyft

Keep in mind, this is a collaboration not a contest. The only prize is that in a few years, together we will have improved the cardiovascular health of millions of people.

The world is improved by the combined efforts of many people in big and small ways. We are excited to see what we can create together.

Thank you.

Thoughts on open-source design

This open-source branding project is a bit of an experiment. There are a few concerns that I would like to address:

Doesn't good design cost money?

Asking people to do work for free makes me nervous. Although we are a well-funded not-for-profit and could hire a design agency to create this brand, we are taking a collaborative open-source approach to involve a broad community from all over the world.

Isn't this spec work?

I'm sensitive to designers' concerns about spec work and I'm genuinely concerned that I'm asking designers to volunteer their professional skills. Spec work usually promises something down the road if you do unpaid work now. This is not spec work - it's volunteer work with no promise of exposure or compensation down the road.

In addition to contributing in a small way to a project that will save lives around the globe, I hope that our critique group will benefit designers who contribute their ideas.

Design by committee results in mediocre design, right?

Design can easily be watered down by making decisions as a group. But, design also benefits from a diversity of ideas. The diamond shaped design process has a lot of value - generate lots and lots of ideas and then narrow in on the best ones.

At the beginning, the brief needs a strong viewpoint. At the end, the decision-making process needs a strong viewpoint. Those parts should not be done by committee. Our team wrote the brief with input from friends. And at the end, I will art direct with input from the community as well as from the designers who I have asked to help moderate the critique.

I'm mostly hopeful that this process will generate many great ideas and fruitful discussions about which ideas best serve the brief. 

This isn't a new idea.

Correct. Many designers have done open-source work. Projects have done open-source brand solicitations previously - check out the relatively recent projects by WebAassembly and NodeJS. I am not the most knowledgeable person in the world about open-source and design, but I did speak to some of the experts. I hope we can adjust, learn, and try to create a great process for projects like this.

About Resolve to Save Lives

Resolve to Save Lives is a five-year, $225 million initiative funded by Bloomberg Philanthropies, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. It is led by Dr. Tom Frieden, former director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and housed at Vital Strategies, which works in 60 countries with the vision of a world in which every person is protected by a strong public health system. To find out more visit: https://www.resolvetosavelives.org

About Vital Strategies

Vital Strategies is a global health organization that seeks to accelerate progress on the world's most pressing health problems. The Vital Strategies team combines evidence-based strategies with innovation to help develop and implement sound public health policies, manage programs efficiently, strengthen data systems, conduct research, and design strategic communication campaigns for policy and behavior change. To find out more, visit www.vitalstrategies.org

Simple, an open-source project to create free tools for the treatment of high blood pressure around the world. As @dburka mentioned in this article

"Great brands often begin with one clearly articulated statement. What makes the “Simple” project different from any other project like it? For us, this all starts with the idea of radical simplicity:

Simple is a simple, reliable, easy-to-use app to track patients with high blood pressure.

Most other software that healthcare workers use is complicated and hard to learn. Our aim is to be a breath of fresh air  an app that’s simple, which nurses and doctors actually like to use"

I am completly agreed with him. This software will be deployed all over the world. We have 3 type of audiance for this brand:

1. Nurses, doctors, and other healthcare workers
2. Health administrators
3. Patients

As Simple will be used in India, China and other countries. Our common touch points are like mobile app, App store, Website, 3D render, Media and animation. We can expect our audiance will come from different culture, region and may speak different language. I feel having Voice and Tone for Simple.org will make this brand more divarse and simple. You can read the difference between voice, tone and style below.

What is Voice, Tone and Style? [1]

Voice is a description of the unique, distinctive voice of your brand. This should cover its personality, Rhythm and pace, Vocabulary.

Tone is how to use your voice in different situations. In life, we adjust our tone according to who we’re talking to and what we’re talking about, but our voice remains the same. Brand voice is singular, but we can use it with many different tones. Separating voice and tone means we can be empathetic to our users, and I think empathy is what makes the difference between just meeting user needs and really engaging them.

Style is a house ‘style’ for what our writing looks like, for example where to use capitals, how to spell certain words, reminders on grammar, vocabulary. This also include design elements like how to use, logo, fonts and images.

We welcome UX writers/Content writers to take this opportunity to create Voice, Tone and Style guidelines for Simple.org brand. For details on active voice and jargon, we encourage reading Mailchimp's excellently written Voice, Tone and Style guidelines, which inspired this section. For a primer on positive language, we think you'll enjoy these Guidelines on being concise using positive language by plainlanguage.gov

Keen to know what do you think on this :)

[1] Voice, tone and style: The whys, wheres and hows

Step 1 can be found here...

One month ago, we called for open source design contributions to develop an identity for Simple. The response has been beyond what I could have hoped for. Many designers from all over the world submitted concepts and, best of all, people picked up ideas from each other and built upon them. It's been really amazing to see the collaborative spirit.

Thank you for all of the work so far

Thank you everyone who contributed ideas so far. I'd like to call out @dannnn, @kellyjepsen, @tdrach, @webalys, @designernaut, @mheesakkers, @ToferFlowers, @Uppalled, @HarlowRaven, @bryansellersdesign, @FriendlyDuck, @philhammel, @kylejohnston, @menachemkrinsky, @csosebee, @jamtrash, @patrickhill, @sambaines, @hckmstrrahul, @jarridb, @lbinhammer, @aentan, and @rickymetz. I love how this has felt like real teamwork so far... I'm so appreciative of all of the hours and heart you have put into the project.

Next steps

A typical brand process looks something like this. We're at Step 2.

• DONE
  Groundwork: Identify needs, research competitive landscape, write brief.
• DONE
  Step 1: Exploration: Explore many design options to solve the brief.
• Step 2: Narrow: Narrow the design options to 2-3 and explore within those options. Start trying the identity in realistic scenarios. Explore colors, type, and secondary assets.
• Step 3: Finalize: Choose one option and refine it for production. Finalize colors, treatments, assets.
• Step 4: Brand guide: Develop a brand guide to follow into the future.

Step 2: Narrow

We would like to try ideas based on three of the options generated during the Exploration phase. The following three options are closest to solving for the creative brief.

Let's take these three concepts and:

1. Refine the mark. Try new ideas based on the options and try refining the options to optimize them.
2. Try the mark in common touch-points. We should try the mark as an app icon, an icon inside the app, a logo on a website like simple.org, as a 3D trophy, as a printed mark on a PDF report.
3. Try color and type treatments. Keeping the touch-points above in mind, try colors and type options that would be suitable.

Here is an example of a color treatment and a quick experiment with a logo in a couple of typical touch-points — download the Sketch file as a starting point, if it's helpful (download Roboto and Roboto Condensed fonts)

Let's go!

Please submit your ideas and options below as an issue. Again, if you're willing please mark your ideas with a CC0 license by writing "CC0 Licensed" with your submission.