A new identity for the US healthcare app reflects a cultural shift towards agency, continuity and care that moves at the pace of real life.
In the US, healthcare has a reputation for being many things and easy to navigate is not one of them. Records are fragmented across providers and state lines, insurers struggle to communicate with one another, and the burden of tracking often falls on the home. According to Trellis, nine in ten women are already managing their family’s care through Apple Notes – a messy and manual reality that ultimately set the context for a rethink.
How&How recently partnered with Trellis to reposition the platform as something far more ambitious than another health admin tool. The brand was built around the idea of a ‘living blueprint’, or a system designed to evolve with users over time, across pregnancies, life stages and generations.
The timing of the project really makes sense, as health is no longer something people are content to outsource entirely. From fertility tracking to preventative care, expectations have shifted towards greater transparency and control. People want to understand their data, not just store it, and they expect digital tools to meet them with clarity rather than condescension.
Trellis’ product promise is deceptively simple. The platform can compile decades of medical history in minutes, turning appointments, vaccinations, genetics and records into a single, usable overview. What it calls ‘Generational Health’ is essentially a living archive that can be passed down, updated and added to over a lifetime, but, as How&How saw it, the brand didn’t yet reflect that scale or sensitivity.
Senior creative Eilidh Reid explains: “The ‘living blueprint’ grew from Trellis curating vast amounts of medical data while also needing to adapt with each user over their lifetime, and across future generations.
“That tension became a design filter we returned to in every decision from systems and data through to imagery and interaction.”
At the foundation of the identity sits a flexible grid system, designed to expand and shift as users’ lives do. It underpins everything from brand assets to product UI, creating consistency without rigidity. Accuracy is paramount here, particularly when dealing with healthcare data, but the system leaves room for nuance and change rather than locking users into static templates.
A library of natural, sunlit photography shows pregnancy and parenthood as they are lived, not idealised. Different ages, family structures and stages are represented, pushing back against the overly polished aesthetic that dominates much of femtech and health branding.
Texture also plays an important role, with a fingerprint motif running through the identity. Sometimes it acts as a subtle background element, and at other times it appears more pronounced across the identity.
“Fingerprints feel like our own living blueprints, and we saw this as a poetic reflection on how everyone’s medical data is unique to them,” Eilidh explains. Zoomed out, it humanises charts and data visualisation; up close, it forms the basis of the logo, with a discreet ‘T’ hidden in the ridges.
Tone of voice was another area where restraint mattered. Healthcare brands often swing between clinical detachment and forced softness. Trellis takes a different tack with what How&How calls the ‘Voice of the Midwife’, inspired by the frank, supportive bedside manner many people encounter at birth. It’s direct, reassuring and unvarnished, offering information without sugar-coating or jargon.
“For us, this always laddered back to the brand strategy and our core idea,” says Eilidh. “Trellis sits in this interesting intersection of data-driven technology and deeply human experiences, and the concept gave us a way to hold both with equal weight.”
That tension is most evident in the product itself. Certain moments, like the ‘journey’ screen, lean into expression, turning precise healthcare data into a visual map that grows and shifts over time. Elsewhere, the brand dials things back. “In some places, we had to accept restraint rather than expression,” Eilidh notes, “but always ensured that humanity was still felt.”
Trellis’ new identity mirrors wider changes in how we think about health. It’s less episodic and institutional and more continuous and personal. Trellis doesn’t pretend to fix the US healthcare system overnight, but it does acknowledge the reality many mothers face and offers a clearer framework to build from. In that sense, it truly lives up to its tagline: ‘the Mother of all healthcare apps’.
