Featured Project: Valo Health
- Services
- Brand Strategy & Positioning
- Naming
- Identity
- Digital Strategy
Imagine a world where every disease has a cure. Where miracles aren’t beyond our reach, but things to be engineered. This is intelligent health.
Valo Health—formerly Integral Health—is a new type of health-focused technology company uniting human and machine intelligence to accelerate the creation of life-changing cures. Founded by David Berry and Brett Blackman—along with a cadre of industry veterans and scientific luminaries—the organization split between Cambridge and San Francisco seeks to not only reimagine the process of drug discovery, but radically reinvent the entirety of the healthcare ecosystem.
One Design worked in lockstep with the Valo Health team and Outcast to develop the brand; leading positioning strategy, naming, identity development, and activation to launch this audacious startup to the world 12 months after its inception.
The entire spectrum of possibility
What’s in a name? The organization required a naming strategy that wouldn’t limit its ambitious plans to grow—a flexible vessel with a strong conceptual narrative designed to evolve alongside the company.
Valo—literally meaning “an individual of the light”—fit the bill as a symbol of hope, optimism, and brilliance—the entire spectrum of possibility unlocked by their breakthrough platform. Valo delivers a new way of seeing. A new way of working. A promise of enlightenment within the field of healthcare. Valo is the radical luminary, leading humanity out of the darkness.
The name of Valo’s data platform—the technological weapon that enables their vision—is Opal. Named for the stone that reveals the entirety of the visual spectrum.
A sublimely flexible visual expression
How can a visual system support the entire spectrum of possibility? Less is more. The radically minimal visual identity is a conceptual gesture to Valo’s ability to transform how we see ourselves, our health, and the healthcare ecosystem in all of its marvelous complexity.
The Valo “lens” logomark represents the company’s ability to see deeper into the complexity of human health than ever-before possible. Simple in form, but rich in interactive possibility, the core identity adapts beautifully to the digital space to play a critical role in communication design and data visualization.
Biology meets technology. Science meets humanity. Together, we go farther. The shadows are behind us. This is intelligent health. We are Valo.
From the Valo Health brand manifesto
"When One Design began work on the Valo brand, I set them an impossible task: make the identity system unlike anything else in biotechnology, and as simple and distinctive as the great design systems of the last century. But don’t give us a dead classic: the brand must also be modern and interactive, evoking the ‘super natural’ possibilities of using artificial intelligence to understand biology too complex for human comprehension.
And they delivered—naming the company, focusing its positioning, defining its visual expression, and creating a simple, conceptual, flexible mark—a lens bringings human health into focus—that could hold its own for any audience, in any medium."
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Jason Pontin
Strategic Advisor to Valo Health
Former Editor in Chief, MIT Technology Review
This is one of the few times I have seen pharma or tech humanized in a way that I can relate to … Valo is taking the Ai machine and putting it in service of humanity. So well done to [the One Design] team.
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Jason Paragas
Advisor, Social Impact Capital
Former Vice President, Valo Health
Former Director of Innovation, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
