Welcoming. Certain. Reassuring.

The brief.

Motivo is the first online platform connecting new therapists with experienced supervisors for the clinical supervision hours a license requires. Founder Rachel McCrickard met us at the Circular Summit, the annual women-entrepreneurship conference hosted by Alice. She had a logo, 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.

A category nobody has seen before pulls the language toward the clinical, which is the last place Motivo needed to be. Workhorse took the logo as the starting point and built outward in two directions at once: a visual identity 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.

The palette and the characters.

Motivo owned a logo, the name set in a coral italic-leaning sans, and Workhorse kept that anchor and pulled the rest of the system around it. The palette moved off healthcare blue into coral and vibrant blue, with a set of pastels for the characters. Those characters do the welcoming: hand-up poses, candid stances, plenty of soft white around them. The cast carried the brand into onboarding screens, marketing pages, and partner conversations, all places the logo alone could not go without sliding back into clinical default.

The voice book.

Release 1.0 came out in November 2018. The book opens with three tonal qualities, Warm and Welcoming, Certain, and Reassuring and Cheerful, then runs them through four working rules: Sincere, Engaged, Straightforward, Clever. Each rule is paired with how to use it on the left and what to watch for on the right. It is built to be opened to one page, mid-task, by someone writing a receipt email or a social post.

Three audience profiles sit underneath: Supervisees (wise, informative, aspirational, intuitive), Supervisors (practical, technical, empowering), and Partner Agencies (opportunistic, cutting edge, experienced). The book taught the in-house team to write to all three without changing who Motivo sounds like. Two months later the brand launched.

The site.

The new identity and the voice book rolled into a relaunched site in January 2019. The same characters do the welcoming, the same voice rules carry every line of text in the product, and the logo Workhorse inherited still does its job, only now there is a world for it to sit inside.

The system holds as Motivo adds audiences and channels: a new page, a new email, a new partner deck all sound and look like the same company.