In October 2021 I joined Practice Plan as a junior graphic designer.
I joined their in-house design team alongside 5 other designers, who have over 100 years of combined design experience. The team have been excellent at helping me to develop as a designer since I joined, and I have seen my design ability go from strength to strength whilst working alongside them.
I joined their in-house design team alongside 5 other designers, who have over 100 years of combined design experience. The team have been excellent at helping me to develop as a designer since I joined, and I have seen my design ability go from strength to strength whilst working alongside them.
Practice Plan is the UK's number one provider of practice-branded dental membership plans, providing a one-stop solution for private dentists to collect patients' direct debit payments, whilst also offering a whole host of benefits, including the specialized practice marketing department, within which I work.
The Practice Marketing team produce all of the plan literature, marketing collateral and advertising campaigns for Practice Plan and our Dental Practices, as well as planning various events such as the yearly 'Workshop Tour', which provides a day for practices at locations across the country to attend an educational seminar hosted by one of the industries leading speakers, alongside a whole host of other activities and benefits for them and their team.
The Practice Marketing team produce all of the plan literature, marketing collateral and advertising campaigns for Practice Plan and our Dental Practices, as well as planning various events such as the yearly 'Workshop Tour', which provides a day for practices at locations across the country to attend an educational seminar hosted by one of the industries leading speakers, alongside a whole host of other activities and benefits for them and their team.
Day to day, the design team at Practice Plan are tasked with creating and amending plan literature for practices, as well as a number of other internal projects for both Practice Plan and parent company Wesleyan. Here are some examples of work that I have produced during my time working with them.
These are some examples of practice literature I spend most of my time designing day-to-day at Practice Plan. As you can see each practice retains its own brand, we don't use our own brand or templated branding to create literature. We not only use the practice's existing branding but we are encouraged to build upon it as we see fit as the level of brand awareness from each practice differs greatly. Some dental groups that own a lot of practices across the country, such as dental partners (whose leaflet you can see on the far left) have detailed plan guidelines we are given to follow, whereas some independent, family-owned dentists such as bath spa dental (whose leaflet you can see in the centre) don't have an internal marketing department and leave it up to us to take control of the branding based on their existing website, logo etc.
If we or the practice feel that they could benefit from a little more attention to their brand, we offer a branding consultancy service which can result in us working on a re-brand for the practice in-house. Above is a small practice branding project I worked on for 'West Auckland Dental Practice'.
The brief that was given was to have a simple, type-based logo of the practice's initials, that included the silhouette of a tooth. Initially, this project was only meant to be a very quick exercise, as they weren't paying for a full rebrand, they just wanted a logo to go on their existing material as they had just joined us and hadn't had a logo in the past, but I took it upon myself to make sure the practice got the best result possible and gave them some options to choose from.
Initially, I worked on the idea that the practice wanted to see, which was specifically to have the silhouette of the tooth inside the letter 'A' of their initials. However, when creating logo variations, both myself and my senior designer felt that there was something better that could be done with the logo, which is when I produced the 2 other logo variations you can see above.
After sending the PDF presentation I had included above, the practice decided to go for the 3rd design variation (The 2 images furthest to the right). This was what I and my senior designer felt was the best option from the start and I was very pleased to have helped a practice get the best out of its branding, especially in a situation where I added a lot of value due to my own initiative.
'One Man Walking, A Million Talking'
'Should I Fill a Gap In My Team'
'Don't Tear Your Hair Out, Tear Some Paper Instead'
We don't only design for external clients in the design team. Internal design projects take up a lot of our time as we have 4 social media channels to run, 3 dental blogs, a multitude of advertising campaigns across digital and print mediums and a whole range of other projects, from e-shots to dental conferences that need graphics for whole stage shows designed.
One of the things I regularly take on is the header images for the blogs we post on the Practice Plan website. These blogs are posted very regularly, sometimes up to 3 times a week, and we need an original image for each of them. These are mostly
un-branded images so we have a lot more creative freedom to produce an image that is visually stimulating and interesting, based solely on the blog's main theme.
un-branded images so we have a lot more creative freedom to produce an image that is visually stimulating and interesting, based solely on the blog's main theme.
Working at Practice Plan for just over a year has really helped me to accelerate my growth as a designer, not least because it has given me the opportunity to continually be designing every day, whilst working within the adobe suite to hone my skills with applications such as InDesign, Illustrator and Photoshop.
Working alongside such an experienced team has also been extremely beneficial for me as they have given me so many amazing tips and constructive feedback to be able to improve myself both in the work I produce for Practice Plan and the freelance work I have been doing as well.
Working alongside such an experienced team has also been extremely beneficial for me as they have given me so many amazing tips and constructive feedback to be able to improve myself both in the work I produce for Practice Plan and the freelance work I have been doing as well.
