Reveal Surgical
Year: 2021
Firm: Operatic Agency
Role: Creative director, brand strategist, designer
Involvement: Brand strategy/platform, brand identity, copywriting, UI design, animation
Team: Rony Mikhael (creative direction, design), Sean Siford (strategy, copy), Chris DiBenedetto (design, animation art direction), Yan Rosa (animation), Mike Mitchell (project management), Mike Rilestone (DP), Tyler Schaafsma (AD)
Reveal Surgical is a medtech company that creates technology that reveals cancerous tissue left behind using traditional methods. Their devices combine an AI engine that provides real-time tissue diagnostics and an intuitive probe that can be manipulated easily during surgery. Surgeons can confidently identify cancerous tissue in vivo, giving patients a greater chance at a better life.
The Inciting Question: How might we create a brand that shakes up the expectations within the medtech industry to match up to their ground-breaking technology?
It’s not every day you get to have a hand in curing brain cancer. Well, maybe not curing, per se, but it certainly was with a sense of extreme altruism that we engaged with ODS Medical on their rebrand. Now named Reveal Surgical, they approached us with the primary challenge of communicating just exactly how innovative and necessary their technology was, and doing so in a way that would engage experienced surgeons, senior procurement professionals, and venture capitalists. This was no easy task, given the fact that innovation within this field seemed to move at a slower pace than desired.
Knowing a name change was coming and that their entrance into the market needed to be unique and powerful, we began by developing a brand platform in order to succinctly articulate what they ultimately do, who they are, why they exist, and who would care. This work would help us define aspects that make up the “person” that is Reveal, the necessary foundation to set us up to define how they look and communicate on all fronts.
Using the brand values determined in the platform as visual pillars, we explored various design directions for the brand identity. While the initial directions we discussed objectively worked, further discussions opened up an opportunity to create a visual language that was more true to the brand on a more visceral level.
We began to consider the Reveal brand from the perspective of being a true disruptor, a company unafraid of challenging the norm and being truly set apart within a traditionally sterile space. While sterility and a colder aesthetic have their place, we realized that the Reveal brand should play a role within this space to counter it, as this is exactly what they’re doing. They’re shaking things up and unwilling to accept the status quo, developing technology that challenges 15 years of absent innovation within the field of oncology.
This attitude needed to come through and is ultimately what propelled us to develop the brand identity we did. The identity was further brought to life through a collage-style explainer animation that helped to outline the value of the innovation to medical procurement specialists. Juxtaposed with clean and cinematic video footage of the company's lab and office, the brand presents as one of legitimacy and humanity all at once.
Of course, this attitude called for the creation of an identity that was visually gripping. So we began to create a series of collages, aiming to establish a visual language that was evocative and represented the brand’s values. This quickly became a very fun exercise, identifying the visuals necessary to tell certain stories within one composited graphic. We established parameters around how these collages should be constructed and outlined what elements should always be present.
Within the collages resides a motif of a singular red dot. This red dot was used to represent that elusive cancer a surgeon would seek to remove. And this red dot was used as the backdrop to the symbol we created for the brand when applying the logo in smaller settings.
The logo is both sharp and round, the sharpness a nod to the context of surgical arts, the roundness offsetting the sharpness to be more approachable, friendly, and human. The disconnections in the letters are inspired by light, the spaces where they disconnect acting as a pseudo shadow, revealing the prominent aspects of the letterforms in the “light”.
The colours we chose were very representative of the light emitted by the technology, and we developed a palette to support it with both neutral and vibrant colours.
Along with the brand platform we developed, we outlined all of the visual aspects and more within a clear Brand Guideline to ensure a cohesive system for clear communication.
Rony Mikhael is incredibly talented. We at Reveal Surgical had the pleasure of working with him on a project to rebrand our medtech startup. He was really able to push limits and hit the right notes with his design work, creating something soulful and yet still refined. He was able to bring our brand to life, connecting with the heart of the company - its people. He was super receptive to feedback and really fun to work with. A+ experience all around.
Sarah Garringer, Director of Marketing, Reveal Surgical
