EMDR Australia Training and Consultation

Problem

EMDR Australia is Dr Gillian Maddock's dream to create a Community of Clinicians and end the isolation felt by professionals when they reach a high level. Giving clinicians calmness, clarity and confidence.

Dr Maddock's mission is to deliver better training, supervision, and consultations, build a skilled workforce and unite Clinical Psychologists to reduce the sense of competition, so people's skills improve.

Her big vision is to create collaborative and peaceful societies that our children want to live in.

She wants to effect change beyond her 1:1 clinical interactions. If she can help 20 people per week and supervise 4 others with 20 clients, they will impact 100 people per week. Imagine that scaled up.

In our first meeting, Gillian explained to us she felt she had an image problem.

We knew her as Gillian from the gym. A charismatic, bubbly person, who always put a smile on faces. We had no idea that she was a leading EMDR practitioner or one of only a few people who could create accredited training for people to become EMDR Psychologists. And frankly, it didn't matter to us.

We needed to shift this and instead focus on that warm, humble, cheerful mannerism that friends, family and we see.

Objective

To build a brand identity to support the strategy, and roll it out across a website.

Audience

Clinical psychologists and therapists who wish to learn new skills.

Solution

As part of the strategy, we outlined how the brand can use softer visual aesthetics - spaciousness, timeliness, efficiency, and elegance to create a visual that amplified Gillian's personality.

We were shooting for a very neutral brand identity, that was classic, modern, gender neutral, sophisticated, mature and light. We needed to keep everything calm.

This solid visual brief could be easily moodboarded. From 2 moodboard concepts, we combined and refined, making a moodboard that was just right. 

Now this is important. During feedback on the moodboards, Gillian told us of an analogy she uses to explain to clients what EMDR psychology is.

"We are all born with an innate mind, our psyche, that moves in one direction (towards healing). It is like a river in that if nothing impedes it, it has a natural flow that cannot be stopped, and it always flows in one direction. It is called the Adaptive Information Processing (AIP) system. When a traumatic event occurs, it's like debris falling in the river. The river cannot flow easily and process information. Instead, information gets stuck. This is the development of a maladaptively stored memory system. EMDR clears the debris, and the river naturally flows."

This is pivotal. The mix of science, nature and re-aligning what's important to people brings everything together. Everything we did visually, stems from this.

Reconnecting with nature is integral to Gillian's world, so we incorporate this feeling in the copy, imagery and colour palettes.

What process did we use to create the brand?

No matter the project, we love sketching out ideas. There's no better way to formulate designs.

We sketched out a hand-drawn typeface to soften Gillian's perceived intimidating appearance. Along with a logo that focused on the 8 sections of EMDR therapy; and another option that was a brain with two hemispheres, split by a river.

Both illustrate EMDR therapy, but the winner was the river, as it is specific to Gillian's work. The hand-drawn typography was replaced with a classic serif font and accompanied by a simple, easy-to-read sans-serif font.

This all got pieced together with a natural colour palette of greys, browns and greens. Using rivers and shapes to create focal points across the website.

This is just the beginning of the project. There's so many more exciting developments to come.

Evaluation

As we designed the identity and wrapped up brand guidelines ready to hand to the web developer, the chosen web developer, decided they didn't want to be involved any longer. The trust we built up over the identity process, gave Gillian the confidence to reach out and ask us to work on a website for her.

Overall, the project was a delight, and within weeks, Gillian was able to sell out training courses, attract speaking opportunities, whilst managing case consultations.