Motivo

A first-of-kind product, with a wordmark and not much else.

Workhorse met Motivo at the Circular Summit, an annual women-entrepreneurship conference hosted by Alice. Rachel McCrickard had a wordmark, a basic message, and a brand-new category to carry: an online platform connecting new therapists with experienced supervisors through the clinical supervision process. There was no other product like it.

The risk with first-of-kind products is over-clinical language. The opportunity is the opposite. Workhorse took the wordmark as the starting point and built outward across two channels at once. A visual identity expansion that swapped the default healthcare blue for a coral-and-vibrant-blue world. And a voice book that pinned the brand language down for the in-house team to use long after the project closed.

Coral and warm blue. Illustrated, not stock.

Motivo had a wordmark in coral italic-leaning sans that the client owned. Workhorse kept that anchor and pulled the rest of the system around it. The palette moved off healthcare blue and into a coral-and-vibrant-blue world supplemented by a pastel character palette. The illustration system became the welcoming surface. Hand-up poses, candid stances, soft white grounds. The cast carried the brand into spaces the wordmark alone could not (onboarding screens, marketing pages, partner conversations) without sliding back into clinical default.

The voice book was the centerpiece.

November 2018. Release 1.0. The Voice & Tone book opens with three tonal qualities. Warm and Welcoming. Certain. Reassuring and Cheerful. It runs those qualities through four operating rules. Sincere. Engaged. Straightforward. Clever. Each rule comes paired with in-practice usage on the left and considerations on the right. The book is built to be opened to a single page, mid-task, by someone writing a transactional email or a social post.

Three audience profiles sit underneath: Supervisees (wise, informative, aspirational, intuitive). Supervisors (practical, technical, empowering). Partner Agencies (opportunistic, cutting edge, experienced). The book taught the in-house team to write to three audiences at once without code-switching. Two months later the brand launched.

Identity, voice, and a site to put them on.

The new identity and the voice book rolled into a relaunched site in January 2019. The same character system anchors the welcoming surfaces. The same voice rules carry every product string. The wordmark Workhorse inherited still does its job, only now there is a world for it to sit inside.

Motivo got built to grow across audiences and channels in the same register. That register was the work.