EMDR Australia: Gillian Maddock creating a warm and approachable service to help other clinicians become EMDR trained. Over the space of 12 months, we strategised, designed and collaborated to create the perfect brand.

EMDR Australia is Dr Gillian Maddock's dream to create a Community of Clinicians and end the isolation felt by professionals when they reach a high level. Giving clinicians calmness, clarity and confidence.

Her mission is to deliver better training, supervision, and consultations, build a skilled workforce and unite Clinical Psychologists to reduce the sense of competition, so people get better. The vision is to create collaborative and peaceful societies that our children want to live in.

She wants to effect change beyond her 1:1 clinical interactions. If she can help 20 people per week and supervise 4 others with 20 clients, they will impact 100 people per week. Imagine that scaled up.

What is EMDR?

If you don't know what EMDR is, it's a complex treatment process to work through trauma and stress. EMDR stands for eye movement desensitisation and reprocessing, to help you process significant traumatic events, like suicide attempts. EMDR is dangerous in the wrong hands, and you need training to be a practitioner in the modality.

There's a few important links that will help explain more - EMDRAA and the EMDR Institute

Gillian Maddock - EMDR Basic Training

In our first meeting, Gillian told us that she had an image problem.

We knew her as Gillian from the gym. A charismatic, bubbly person, who always put a smile on faces. We had no idea that she was a leading EMDR practitioner or one of only a few people who could create accredited training for people to become EMDR Psychologists. And frankly, it didn't matter to us.

We needed to shift this and instead focus on that warm, humble, cheerful mannerism that friends, family and we see.

How did we improve Gillian's brand image?

As part of the strategy, we outlined how the brand can use softer visual aesthetics - spaciousness, timeliness, efficiency, and elegance to create a visual that amplified her personality.

We were shooting for a neutral brand identity, that was classic, modern, gender neutral, sophisticated, mature and light.

This formed a solid visual brief that we could moodboard. From 2 moodboard concepts, we combined and refined, making a moodboard that fed the ideas we had. 

Now this is important. During feedback on the moodboards, Gillian told us of an analogy she uses to explain to clients what EMDR psychology is.

"We are all born with an innate mind, our psyche, that moves in one direction (towards healing). It is like a river in that if nothing impedes it, it has a natural flow that cannot be stopped, and it always flows in one direction. It is called the Adaptive Information Processing (AIP) system. When a traumatic event occurs, it's like debris falling in the river. The river cannot flow easily and process information. Instead, information gets stuck. This is the development of a maladaptively stored memory system. EMDR clears the debris, and the river naturally flows."

This is pivotal. The mix of science, nature and re-aligning what's important to people brings everything together. Everything we do visually stems from this.

Reconnecting with nature is integral to Gillian's world, so we incorporate this feeling in the copy, imagery and colour palettes.

What process did we use to create the brand?

No matter the project, we love sketching out ideas. There's no better way to formulate designs.

We sketched out a hand-drawn typeface to soften Gillian's perceived intimidating appearance. Along with a logo that focused on the 8 sections of EMDR therapy; and another option that was a brain with two hemispheres, split by a river.

Both illustrate EMDR therapy, but the winner was the river, as it is specific to Gillian's work. The hand-drawn typography was replaced with a classic serif font and accompanied by a simple, easy-to-read sans-serif font.

This all got pieced together with a natural colour palette of greys, browns and greens. Using rivers and shapes to create focal points across the website.

This is just the beginning of the project. There's so many more exciting developments to come.