XR training platform brand identity
Agency
Urban Pixels
Client
TruHealer
Role
Creative director | Brand
”Soft skills are now hard requirements.
2024 AMA Journal on Medical Training Gaps
TruHealer is an empathy-first, AI-powered mixed-reality platform that trains medical professionals on the human side of care. Founder Dave Lin came in with a working prototype and a fundraise on the horizon. He needed a brand built from zero.
I led the full 0-to-1 creation. Logo, type, color, voice, motion, applications, partner lockups, usage guidelines, marketing site. The category indexes on procedural fidelity. Osso VR, SimX, Body Interact. None lead with empathy. That gap was the brief.
Brand Foundation
Before any mark, the strategy. Three exercises, three artifacts, each narrowing the next.
Thematic exercise. Sixty-plus terms pulled from founder interviews, competitor scans, and category language. Wide on purpose. The point was to surface everything the brand could be before deciding what it had to be.
Key themes. The cloud collapsed into four directions: Empathetic, Forward-Thinking, Trustworthy, Transformative. Each one carries weight in the category. Empathetic was the only one no competitor was claiming.
Brand personality traits. Three pillars, five sub-traits each. Empathy as the wedge. Innovation as the credibility floor. Trust as the load-bearing wall. The Venn puts TruHealer where all three meet, but the visual hierarchy was deliberate. Empathy reads as the front door, not the finish.
This is the structure every downstream decision filters through. Icon. Type. Color. Voice. Motion. If a choice didn’t reinforce empathy first, it didn’t ship.
The Challenge
Make empathy structural, not decorative. Then prove the system can flex across product UI, fundraise deck, OOH digital, and partner lockup.
Icon: five directions explored. The smilo won. A T cradled above a smile. Training, trust, technology stacked with empathy, care, healing.
Type: wordmark drawn on Overused Grotesque, modified, optically balanced to the symbol. Plus Jakarta Sans and Montserrat carry the system.
Color: Healing Ocean teal sits between blue (clinical) and green (wellness) on purpose.
System: tokens, clear-space tied to the smile, six approved color pairings, a constructed partner lockup.
The Solution
An identity that is own-able because it cannot be copied with a bigger roadmap. Competitors can out-spend TruHealer on fidelity. They cannot put empathy in the mark itself.
The system established a clear hierarchy. Empathy first. Innovation second. Trust as the floor. Brand essence locked at Where Innovation Meets Empathy.
It translates. Marketing site, mixed-reality product UI, social, OOH, business cards, partner lockups, in-headset overlays. One source of truth.
It positions TruHealer as the only player in medical simulation leading with the human side of care. First customer: Central Michigan University.
