Wysa
A mental health app brand identity for Wysa, built around the people using it.
How AI stopped being the picture
It's late, you can't sleep, and the last thing you want is to explain yourself to another person. So you open an app instead. A small blue penguin says hello, offers to help you love and nurture yourself, and nothing you type goes anywhere with your name attached. That's Wysa, an AI mental health app with clinical evidence behind it and a lot of people quietly using it at hours when nobody else is awake.
The people feeling the brand problem weren't the ones in the app, though. They were the commissioner at an NHS trust, or the HR lead. By 2023 Wysa was selling to them as much as to anyone downloading the app, and what reached them was a logo, a few colours, a couple of typefaces and nothing written down about how any of it worked together. So whoever made the next deck made their own design decisions.
None of it was wrong, exactly. Each piece looked fine on its own, and only together did they stop looking like one organisation. For a service asking a health system to trust it with people in a bad way, that's an expensive impression to leave, and it was holding back growth.
What the category kept putting on screen
The work started with the position: who the brand was talking to, and what it needed to say to them. Look at what competitors said about themselves showed up glowing brain images, circuit boards and close-ups of phone screens, with hardly a face among them. A whole category had decided the machine was the interesting part.
Leading on the AI was the obvious route, because it's the differentiator and the thing investors and journalists ask about first. But nobody opens an app like this wanting to talk to a machine. They open it because of how they feel.
So the brand positioning put the person first and the technology second. The brand model was written from there, with mental health support for everyone as the proposition, and anonymity, expertise, respect and integrity underneath it.
It became about the people
A circle does most of the work. It crops into a layout as a background accent, or frames a person in a photograph, cutting behind them so they sit inside the brand rather than on top of it. Photography of people carries more of this digital mental health brand than anything else does. A stylistic approach was set to ensure photography was natural, candid, and authentic. It also switched the focus. Previously, Wysa had used imagery showing the emotion at the beginning of the journey, which conveyed sadness. Instead, photography shifted to focus on the results: relief, happiness, and peace.
Navy, pink and white lead the palette and set the backgrounds and headlines, orange is used exclusively for accents, and pale blue and a near-black purple sit below them. Sofia Pro was chosen as the lead typeface. It’s soft letterforms feel human, rather than mechanical and robotic.
The wordmark carried a significant amount of brand equity, and that shaped everything around it. Its teal became a colour the rest of the brand can't touch. The logo keeps a colour of its own, and the palette around it does the heavy lifting.
The penguin got pulled back at the same time. It gives the AI a face inside the app, which is where it earns its place, and it does very little for a document going to a health service, so it stays in the product.
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