Elara Medical — Brand Identity & UX Design

Context

Elara Medical was a health tourism clinic in İzmir, Turkey, seeking to reach international patients — primarily from the UK, Germany, and Iran — through a credible digital presence and streamlined patient inquiry process.

This project preceded the Artemis Clinics platform by two years, and the research conducted here directly informed the product thinking that later won an A' Design Award.

The Challenge

Turkish health clinics targeting international patients typically communicate through fragmented channels: WhatsApp, PDF brochures sent by email, and phone calls. Elara needed a digital presence that would signal clinical credibility to patients evaluating treatment options remotely — before they'd ever spoken to a human.

Trust at a distance is the core problem of health tourism UX.

Brand Identity

Designed the complete Elara Medical visual identity:

Naming rationale: "Elara" carries a classical elegance — fitting for a premium medical brand. Easy to pronounce in English, German, and Farsi. Distinct from the clinical/sterile naming common in the Turkish healthcare sector.

Visual identity: A restrained palette of deep teal and clean white, with warm gold as a secondary accent for premium touchpoints. The logo combines precision (symmetry, clean geometry) with warmth (humanized letterform curves) — the exact balance a health tourism brand needs.

Brand system: Full brand book covering logo usage, color specifications, typography, and a component library for digital and print applications.

UX Design

Designed the patient-facing digital experience across two surfaces:

Website: Three core flows — Procedure Discovery (what does this clinic treat?), Trust Building (accreditations, before/after, doctor profiles), and Inquiry Conversion (get in touch, start the process). Each flow designed around a specific user mental model: "Is this clinic qualified? Do I trust them? How do I start?"

Patient inquiry form: Replaced the generic "contact us" form with a structured consultation request: procedure interest, treatment timeframe, patient country, and specific questions. Structured data for the clinic team; a lower-friction entry point for the patient.

What Carried Forward

The research from this project — specifically the finding that trust is the #1 barrier for international health tourism patients and that pricing transparency creates trust rather than doubt — became foundational inputs for the Artemis Clinics platform design in 2024.

Building for one clinic first taught me what didn't scale. The Artemis platform was designed to solve all of it at the market level.