Since I began working with DePuy Synthes in 2023, the MedTech giant has been through two major rebrands, moving from their standalone sub-brand into the unified Johnson & Johnson family, and now they're coming into their own in a bold and exciting way.
That kind of change is never simple, especially when the brand identity keeps shifting underneath a live pipeline of medical education and product launches that still needs to go out the door. As Senior Creative I was the go to person for guidance, not just for my own team at the studio but for a huge number of teams on the client side too. A lot of my time went into helping shape how motion and video projects should actually look at each stage, work that had to hit the goals of the project while also staying on brand, even when the brand itself was still moving. There were even some projects went through the full journey, reworked and carried through all three brand identities as things evolved.
On top of my usual day to day of creating animated content, I ended up becoming the person the team came to for something a bit different, digesting new medical technologies and surgical techniques and figuring out how to turn them into visuals that were actually accurate. That meant properly learning things like total knee arthroplasty, not just what happens but why each step actually matters clinically, so that anything we put out, whether it was made by me or the wider team, would hold up if a surgeon or medical reviewer looked at it closely. At the same time it still had to do its job of getting internal teams and customers genuinely excited for new product launches.
Because we were working in the medical industry, everything we made had to work on two levels of scrutiny. It needed to stay inline with the brand, but it also had to get signed off by the legal and governance team, making sure every claim in a video was accurate and properly backed by evidence. I got really familiar with that whole process, learning how to reference sources properly and weave disclaimers into scripts and visuals in a way that didn't end up distracting from or overcomplicating the actual creative.
It's a bit of a balancing act really. Get the science wrong and you lose trust straight away, play it too safe and nobody cares, and if the compliance side isn't right nothing gets out the door at all. Three years, three brand identities and a lot of legal sign offs later, that's the balance I helped DePuy Synthes find.