TL;DR: Tiffany Futrell had built a specialized perinatal psychiatry practice, but her DIY website wasn't communicating what made her different. I created a colorful, personality-filled brand and redesigned her Squarespace website to balance her clinical expertise with her warmth, humor, and refreshingly human approach to mental health care. We carried that same vision into her brand photography (including a handmade floral blouse that deserves its own moment) and social media templates. Shortly after launch, Tiffany reported more website engagement, a record number of intakes over a two-week period, and an investment that had already paid for itself.
Sage Psychiatry: Branding a Mental Health Practice That Wasn't Afraid to Stand Out
When Your Website Looks Like Everybody Else's
Brand Strategy + Visual Identity · Messaging · Brand Photography · Squarespace Website Redesign · Social Media Templates · Brand Guidelines
When Tiffany Futrell started building her website for Sage Psychiatry, she did what a lot of small business owners do when they're figuring things out on their own:
She looked at other websites in her industry and used them as a guide.
Which seems perfectly reasonable…until you realize that everyone else might be doing exactly the same thing.
Tiffany is a psychiatric nurse practitioner specializing in perinatal mental health, providing care for people navigating pregnancy, postpartum, and all the complicated changes that can come with them. She has a specific approach to her work, specialized expertise, and a personality that doesn't exactly scream generic healthcare website. But you wouldn't have known much of that from her original branding.
The copy played it safe, her personality was missing, and her specialization wasn't immediately obvious. She was also having trouble getting found online unless someone was already searching for her specifically.
As Tiffany put it:
"Even when you did find it, there was nothing to distinguish it from the hundreds of other private practices that looked just like it."
She knew she wanted something different. Something that felt more like her. The problem was that she wasn't entirely sure how far she could push things without compromising her professional credibility. And I could understand the hesitation. Mental health branding has some pretty established visual conventions. Soft colors, soothing language, delicate illustrations, the occasional strategically placed houseplant. There's a reason those things are popular, but they weren't particularly representative of Tiffany.
So we had an interesting challenge: create a brand that could communicate specialized psychiatric expertise while making room for the funny, candid, colorful person providing that care.
And maybe retire a few of those stock photos of plants while we were at it. 😉
Serious About Mental Health. Less Serious About Everything Else.
One of the things I liked about Tiffany right away was how clearly her personality came through when we talked. She's knowledgeable, direct, warm, and funny. She takes her work seriously, but she doesn't seem particularly interested in making the experience of psychiatric care feel more intimidating than it already can.
That distinction became an important part of the brand strategy.
Sage Perinatal Psychiatry provides specialized, evidence-based mental health care. Its audience includes people navigating experiences that can be exhausting, confusing, frightening, joyful, and sometimes all of those things before breakfast.
The brand needed to make room for that complexity.
I wanted someone visiting the website to feel like they could bring their whole experience into the conversation, including the messy, uncomfortable, less-than-Instagram-worthy parts.
We built the brand around three guiding values:
Take It Seriously. Talk Like a Human. Make Room for Hope.
They gave us a useful filter for everything that followed. We could use humor, but it had to feel appropriate. We could be optimistic without minimizing someone's experience. And we could communicate clinical expertise in language that sounded like it came from an actual person.
One of the brand statements we developed sums it up pretty well:
Care that takes you seriously without making everything feel so damn serious.
That became the spirit of Sage.
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