Brand & Web Design for Massage Therapist
Rooted Holistic Bodywork (RHB) offers holistic healing services in an ethical, inclusive, and accessible way. Along with holistic healing services, RHB offers education for spiritually conscious humans. Teresa helps humans create somatic connections between their emotions and their muscles through sacred and intentional energy work. To her, she is cultivating a mind, body, and soul connection with other humans. Teresa uses a variety of tools from her holistic health background to help her clients feel, heal, release and transmute the heavier emotions trapped in their bodies.
Services
Brand Strategy
Visual Brand Design
Squarespace Web Design
Print Design
The Mission
People who receive bodywork need more than just a massage. They need a whole-body experience that helps them transmute pain and deal with internal trauma stored in the body. People deserve to learn about body and energywork from this lens as well. This is what Teresa at Rooted Holistic Bodywork would consider ethical body and energy work. My goal at the Arcoíris Design Studio was to communicate how Teresa is more than just a massage therapist to her audience.
The Outcome
I designed the Rooted Holistic Bodywork visual identity to represent the depth of Teresa’s service offerings from the ground up. I captured her brand through a new set of logos for her main business, Rooted Holistic Bodywork, and her soon-to-be school, The Mind-Body School (MBS). With this visual foundation in place, I then developed a highly-effective website that educates her clients and converts them into customers using my background in web design for healers.
The Impact
Since the introduction of her brand, Teresa has been more confident as a service provider and a more effective leader. She has seen an increase in bookings and interest in her offerings as well.
Connected Through Community
Teresa and I first met at the end of 2020 through the Align & Flow community, hosted by Natalie Brite. I connected with Teresa because of her loud voice and deep passion for changing the world in a positive way. She was sharing her truth about inclusive and ethical body and energywork online, and that drew me in. Through this discourse, I decided to book a massage with her, which for me was a big deal because I never really had a passion for getting regular massages prior to meeting her (I kind of thought they were a luxury?) Furthermore, us connecting was an even bigger deal because it all took place during the context of COVID, meaning that my choosing to connect and receive bodywork by her during lockdown was an even bigger deal.
Upon receiving my first massage from Teresa, I knew she was special. I was moved by my initial experience with her and knew I wanted to continue coming back and receiving regular treatment with her. She also practiced reiki with me and I was blown away by how healing it was for me. Living in San Diego, I have had encounters with reiki prior to meeting Teresa, but none of those experiences were as powerful as the one I had with her.
After that, I didn’t speak to Teresa for a few months. The holidays rolled around and COVID kept us apart. But, I kept engaging with her online. I kept connecting with her. I knew there was a reason we had connected and why we were in each other’s orbit.
During the time where we drifted apart, I noticed that Teresa’s presence online did not match at all to the potency of her offerings. The massage/energywork experience I had with her was so healing and powerful, but I did not see that same potency reflected in her visual identity online. There was a gap for me, and as a designer it threw me off. I knew there was potential for us to work together and communicate her services in a more meaningful way, and I trusted that the universe would guide us together to make that happen.
Eventually, we reconnected and did decide to work together! Teresa had been working with Natalie Brite as her business coach, and as a previous client of mine (and now my own personal coach as well!), she highly recommended we connect about a project together. Teresa was looking to revamp her business in response to launching a new offering, The Mind-Body School. We decided that visual branding would be key to launching the school with the best foot forward. We also decided that after we established a strong visual identity, we would translate that into an easy-to-use and functional website.
Brand Strategy
The first challenge when working through Teresa’s rebrand is that we were branding two entities, not one. Teresa was looking to create branding for Rooted Holistic Bodywork, her actual business, and The Mind-Body School, a membership platform within her business. Initially, Teresa pictured creating two separate visual identities for her business and her membership platform, but I disagreed with that approach. I knew that it would be more powerful for her brand as a whole to create a strong cohesive brand made up of complementary components.
In order to explain this approach to Teresa, I started the project with a deep dive into brand strategy. I looked into Teresa’s business, its current standings online, and areas for improvement. I researched different audience personas for her business and also took a look at her competitors. Furthermore, I also shared my initial ideas for a visual brand direction through a moodboard and corresponding color palette. I shared all these findings with Teresa in an in-depth Brand Strategy Presentation where she would have an opportunity to refine or course-correct anything that felt off for her about my findings.
Teresa loved my findings. This gave me the go-ahead to move into logo design. But first, I moved into a sacred pause.
Sacred Pause
For my sacred pause in this project, I took a weekend trip to Joshua Tree. For those of you that don’t know, Joshua Tree is a place where I find deep connection to the divine. Spending 3 days in the desert helped me in so many ways. I felt healed from the monotonousness of daily life during COVID, I felt connected to female energy, and I felt energized by the magic of Mother Earth (showcased to me as the desert.) I came back from the desert different than how I entered it and was so incredibly inspired by the scenery, energy and potency of Joshua Tree.
Brand Design
It was through this lens that I started working on Teresa’s brand design. I felt connected to the universe and my creativity poured out of me. All in all, her entire brand took me upwards of 6 hours to put together. I knew exactly what I wanted to create once I opened Illustrator that day and the design came through seamlessly. From there, I put together a Concept Presentation for Teresa to review which included a main logo for RHB, an alternate logo, 2 submarks for RHB, a main logo for MBS and 2 submarks for MBS.
When Designing Teresa’s logos, I had one goal in mind: create a brand that was cohesive and unique. I had established a soft yet punchy color palette for her already during the Brand Strategy phase and had also found some inspiration that showcased healing hands, a visual metaphor Teresa was looking to include in her brand. I wanted to take those initial ideas that I discovered during my strategy phase and distill them into a new representation, something different than what was already out in the world.
To solve this problem, I created two representations of Teresa’s logo mark. In one variation, the hands are facing upward and energy is pouring out of them in an outward motion. In the other, the hands are on top of one another and the energy is enclosed between them.
I decided to use the outward expanding graphic for RHB because has the potential to reach the most people and create the most impact. I used the more controlled energetic graphic for MBS because its goal is to teach conscious humans how to be more authentic and intentional with their bodywork and energetic practices.
I also used symbols that would resonate with Teresa’s target audience like the moon and leaves in her branding. The moon represents spirituality and intuition, cornerstones of Teresa’s business. The leaves represent grounding and rootedness with Mother Earth. Plus, I incorporated color psychology to help her logos showcase trust, passion, and intuition with her audience.
For the submarks, I created variations for RHB and MBS that both followed the same structure. As you’ll see, they follow the same structure as the main logo, where they use different versions of the same graphic elements.
RHB Showcase
The Results
Teresa was blown away by the visual brand identity I created for her. She loved it and did not have any major refinements to make to the logos. She shared with me at this point in the process how healing this journey had been for her so far and was grateful for how in-depth my process had been to that point to really draw out the best in her for her brand identity.
Now, we just needed to take this new branding and start implementing it on a new website for her business.
“I almost started crying on my way home last night after leaving the center + looking at the brand kit. I’m overwhelmed with gratitude Alex. I had no idea how healing this process could be bringing the internal branding to life with the visual. Your passion for branding + design—feels like you’re an angel in my life.”
Website Strategy
The next stage in our process was to head back into strategy, this time for Teresa’s website. Teresa’s Website Strategy Presentation included details about her goals for her website, the needs of her clients, a website sitemap, and styleboards. Overall, this strategy phase is much shorter than the Brand Strategy Phase and comes together fairly quickly. That’s why it’s crucial in my process to do brand strategy at the start of a project, it influences every stage of the project that follows it.
For the website styleboards, I started from scratch when coming up with ideas for Teresa’s website. Looking at her old website and other web design for healers, I didn’t see a lot that I could pull from for reference. I ended up turning to the internet for inspiration instead. I was drawn to moody gradients and abstract shapes as elements to incorporate into Teresa’s site design. With those main features in mind, I started created a starting point for the website.
Front End Web Design for Healers
Next was the website mockup. I took the initial styleboards I had created and expanded on them to create a signature look for Teresa’s website. From there, I sent it to Teresa for approval and then moved into designing her interior pages.
When initially researching Teresa’s competitors during the Brand Strategy phase of our project, what struck me most about them was how minimal and outdated most of their websites were. Most of them looked as though they had been built in 2012 and did now showcase the professionalism or depth of the industry. Furthermore, most of them were designed with poor UX in mind, leading users on strange journeys with no predictable outcomes. This meant I wanted to keep Teresa as far away from her industry norm as possible.
Website Interactivity
Plus, I wanted to introduce UX elements to make the journey of viewing Teresa’s website more engaging and playful for her audience. Two areas in the particular showcase this goal:
The timeline feature on Teresa’s About Page
The FAQ section on the Reiki & Energywork Page
Most web design for healers is very bare bones, much different than what Teresa was looking to create. Since Teresa’s website is content-heavy, I wanted to ensure her website was built in a way that kept users interested as they read it. These interactive elements play a role in providing visual interest so users remain on her website rather than clicking out to something else.
Templated Design for Empowered Website Use
The beauty of Teresa’s website design is that it is fully templated and really user-friendly. In conjunction with the website itself, I built a sales page template that Teresa will be able to use over and over again as a part of her marketing efforts for her business. She will also have the ability to jump into any page of her website and create any of the designs I laid out for her using the templates I created on her website.
Furthermore, I have provided Teresa with step-by-step tutorial videos showing her exactly how the website works so she can use it on her own. This website is built in a way so that I am not a gatekeeper to the design and is meant to empower Teresa to use her website as a tool to grow her business and evolve with her.
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