By Christopher Hickey, LMS EVP/CEO
The Lexington Medical Society is proud to announce the launching a completely new, modern, professionally-designed website and a new brand logo. This effort was started earlier this year in an effort to make our website more mobile friendly and make our logo more modern and representative of our Society. We worked with Makespace, a website design company, to assist us in this effort. Makespace started their design process by studying us in order to tailor our website and logo to our culture and vision.
The design process began with member surveys and personal interviews conducted by the Makespace staff in order to learn about our culture, vision, mission, and strategic plan. They produced an analysis of the Society that was surprisingly accurate and then used this to construct our website and logo. Makespace captured their analysis in a “Branding Guide” that depicts various color versions of our new logo, outlines a template of colors and fonts LMS will use for our website, newsletters, social media, and marketing products in order to present a more consistent, professional look.
At the center of the new design is our new logo. The new logo design was a collaborative process between the Makespace marketing and graphic designers and our Executive Board. The Makespace designers advised us to have a less cluttered, simple look to the logo – while assuring that everything depicted remained meaningful. We went through about a half-a-dozen revisions of the logo. The center of the logo is the Rod of Asclepius – the true and authentic symbol of Medicine. The Rod of Asclepius is a single serpent entwined rod wielded by the Greek God of Healing and Medicine, Asclepius. The Rod of Asclepius at the center of our logo symbolizes our physician-centric focus. The Lexington Medical Society’s strategic vision puts physicians at the center -we focus on developing programs and services that add value to our members. Our Physician Wellness Program is an example of our physician-centric approach. The Makespace staff, through interviewing our members, identified the intense pride that comes with being one of the oldest medical societies in the country. To signify this, the top of our logo features the date of our founding, 1799. The Makespace designers also captured how proud our members are of Lexington and its horse culture by bounding the logo with a horseshoe. Their designers did a subtle acknowledgment of our basketball crazy culture and “bluegrass” with the blue color of the logo. The official color of the logo is blue, although you might see a black or white version, depending on the background.
Besides our logo prominently featuring the year of our founding, Makespace has designed a historical timeline on our website based on the book, Medicine in the Athens of the West, by W. Porter Mayo, MD, PhD. This book was developed and published to acknowledge the Lexington Medical Society’s bicentennial in 1999. Contact LMS if you would like us to send you a copy. The website will creatively depict prominent physicians and events throughout our history.
In addition to a more aesthetically pleasing and culturally accurate design, the website will be a constructed with the latest in website technology. This is not simply reconstruction of our old website – this is a completely new build using the latest in website software. The biggest change you will see is our website now being “responsive.”
A responsive website automatically adjusts to whatever size screen you are using. Our old website only used a portrait view and had a lot of dead space on either side when viewed on a desktop. The old website did not adjust to a mobile device making it hard to read without expanding it with your fingers. A responsive website will use the entire screen of a desktop or mobile device, no matter what the size of the screen. The biggest difference you will see is from a mobile device. The website will automatically adjust to your smartphone or tablet making it much more readable.
The new website and logo is intended to keep up with the times in terms of technology and design. In 2016 mobile surpassed the desktop in how people interact with the internet. We will use the modern platform of our new website and integrated branding to communicate programs and services that are physician-centric and add value to our members professionally and personally.
