Abbott Labs

The Process

Abbott is one of the leading pharmaceutical companies and has had enormous expansion from new product innovations as well as mergers and buyouts of other pharmaceutical makers. Along with a wide array of drugs, Abbott also has a wide variety of diagnostic devices, tests and standardized testing equipment — many of these came as a result of the mergers and acquisitions of the competitors. As a result, the need was to pull all of these various interests together including  the overseas markets subsidiaries to help establish Abbott as a world leader.

The big challenge was to make identification clear and easy — so that a lab technician can quickly grab a tool that they need OR recognize the correct medication through a clear identification system THAT CAN ALSO cross international language barriers. It was never going to be a one-size-fits-all option nor was it possible to make the branding identity small and compact. The brand identification structure needed to be large enough to encompass an enormous variety of various types of drugs, devices and packing elements and scalable to a variety of package sizes, dimensions and constraints.

The End Result

This end result was hierarchical structure based on proportions and scaling. The brand base color is "Abbott blue" but under that is color palette that is extremely extensive to include various bacterial or viral drugs, therapies and tests. The package is based on a percentage system of scaling with the primary face panel proportional with the upper portion giving a space for the logo which is proportionally based on line widths with of the "A" logo. The name of the drug/test along with then line spacing is also proportionally based off of that logo size with a line drawing of the disease/virus/bacterial in the lower corner. If it sounds confusing — the implementation also needed to be understandable for execution in a variety of languages. The user/brand manual and guidelines needed to be easy-to-follow so regardless of the language. A packaging specialist in India, Illinois or Egypt needed to be able to execute the brand on the fly.

Legal requirements required that the rebranding be done for all 1500 products within a year of the merger contract. The spec manual had to be cohesive enough to give clear direction to all types packaging (boxes, bags or blister-pacs) such that it could be implemented by a packaging production houses or inside designer at a variety of locations quickly and efficiently AND provide the same consistent results regardless of where the drug was manufactured.

Time sensitive drugs and interventions could be developed along with packaging for quick turnaround and implementation in a variety of market... such as the Abbott Covid test during the Coronavirus pandemic.

I was part of a 5-person team that focused exclusively on the rebranding of Abbott. My role in this process was to provide design implementation and die changes for best/worst case scenario packaged products as a means to test out the guidelines — a human-designer guinea pig making test packaging recommendations and looking at the design logic. The implimentation included a variety of products included strangely configured boxes, shrink-wrapped packages and blister cards that all needed to conform to a brand standard and again... easy to execute by a designer whom may or may not understand English. When the best design options were selected, the guidelines for packaging were included in the spec book in such a way as it was easy to follow without necessarily reading the text.