To kickoff, we conducted a series of remote brand discovery workshops. Facilitated by our creative team, and with full participation from Alena’s leadership team, we engaged in open dialogue about the brand’s vision, goals, values, top audiences, personality traits, and competitors.

During the competitive landscape exercise, it quickly became clear there was an opportunity to position Alena closer to ‘Academic’ and ‘Modern,’ which was the least populated quadrant with other brands in the mental health space.

In terms of personality, Alena is both intelligent and approachable, and we articulate this brand persona through the concept of ‘Brilliant Peer: A thoughtful friend who shares eye-opening ideas and insights from a place of care and understanding for who you are and where you’re at.’

Everything we created was informed by this personality

Alena's vibrant brand system uses compassionate, thoughtful language, combined with expressive imagery to correspond to emotional states. The logo, our foundation for the visual identity, invokes a cell that shifts and changes, illustrating how emotions scientifically impact our brains.

Our primary color, salmon, provides a friendly, inviting warmth that also happens to set Alena apart from the crowd of cool-tone competitors. In color psychology, salmon brings up feelings of kindness, individuality, compassion, and acceptance.

Once the overarching look and feel were established, we conducted a thorough type exploration, arriving at two primary typefaces that would allow us to strike the right balance of intelligence and approachability. We then expanded the color palette with accent colors and developed a series of graphic elements including gradients that mimic shifting emotional states.

To demonstrate our vision for the Alena brand, we created a series of visual mockups as proofs of concept, showing how all of the elements could come together in a real-world application.

Upon launching the new brand, Alena secured $2.7M in seed funding in a recent round led by prominent European based venture capital fund Stride with participation from Re.Mind, a mental health focused fund. This funding will position Alena to release its first product which aims to tackle social anxiety later this year.