Institutions with an extensive history often face a common visual design challenge: How do you communicate your legacy and vision in a way that feels forward-looking and fresh?
In the case of Wills Eye Hospital, we eagerly accepted this challenge in creating a new design for their 2016-17 academic calendar. From the outset, we knew that our approach had to convey their status as a long-standing world-class leader in the fields of patient care, ophthalmic education, and vision research, but also project a contemporary look and feel.

Intended to serve both marketing and informational purposes, the new calendar we created contained visual elements that were inspired and informed by diagrams of rays of light passing through a human eye. We also created a language of bold angles, rings, and textures in the primary colors of “Wills Eye Red” and a striking complementary purple.
Throughout this project, we focused on creating a rhythm through repetition and variation of these elements throughout the publication while paying particular attention to balancing the overall composition and use of space in presenting in-depth event information and a calendar on every page.
Once we locked in the design of the calendar, the visuals were adapted and applied to an accompanying brochure for the organization’s 21st Biennial Cornea Conference, an esteemed event that educates ophthalmologists and cornea specialists on current concepts related to treatment, disease, and surgery.


Working in tandem, these pieces presented a unified aesthetic for our client that reflected their reputation as a true global leader in comprehensive eye care.