CASE STUDY

Maturing Manta's Brand

I took on evolving the Manta Cares brand from a scrappy startup look into something a frightened person could trust at a glance, without losing the warmth that made us worth trusting in the first place.

🚧 Under Construction 🚧

Please bear with me while I get these draft case studies refined. They are a work in progress, but they are here in draft form to give you a general sense of my work while I finish up!

Head of Design · Manta Cares · 2025

When you're newly diagnosed with cancer, you don't really read a product. You glance at it and decide, in about half a second, whether it's safe to hand your worst week to. Manta Cares is a free, HIPAA-compliant platform for cancer patients and their care partners, and in May 2025 our brand was making the wrong half-second impression — earnest, a little chaotic, the visual equivalent of a hackathon project that had borrowed a lab coat. As the only designer at the company, I spent the following year quietly growing the brand up. This is the story of how, and of why "growing up" never meant "getting colder."

The Problem

Manta started the way most mission-driven startups do: fast, scrappy, and held together by the conviction that the work mattered more than the polish. That conviction was right. But a year in, the seams were showing in ways that actually cost us. We had three blues that all thought they were the blue. Type was a default sans-serif doing its best to seem neutral and instead seeming like nothing. Buttons changed shape between the web app and the mobile app. An error message could be a friendly nudge in one place and a wall of red panic in another.

For most products, that's untidy. For ours, it was a trust problem. Our users skew older, frequently rural, often navigating the worst news of their lives on a phone in a waiting room — and inconsistency reads, to a scared person, as amateur. As the sole designer, I didn't have the luxury of a six-month rebrand offsite or a team to delegate it to. I had a live product, a real audience showing up every day, and one rule I set for myself: mature the brand without ever making it feel clinical. Plenty of healthcare brands look trustworthy by looking sterile. We couldn't afford that. The whole reason a patient chooses Manta over a hospital portal is that we feel like a person, not a system.

So this was never a rebrand. It was a maturation — keeping the equity and the heart, and raising the floor everywhere underneath them.

The Approach

I treated the brand like a person growing into adulthood rather than a building to be demolished. Keep the voice. Keep the warmth. Keep what users already recognized. But make every individual decision — every color value, every type size, every component — earn its place against two questions: can our actual user read this and act on it, and does this make us look like we can be trusted with something serious?

There were two things I set out to move. The measurable one: task completion and drop-off in our core flows, especially among older users. The unmeasurable-but-unmistakable one: whether the product felt like it was made by people who knew what they were doing. The four principles below are how I got there.

Principle 1

Warmth You Can Actually Read

Our original palette was warm, which I loved, and inaccessible, which I did not. The goldenrod we used for emphasis failed contrast against white. Our error states were a single aggressive red that was both hard to read and emotionally loud — exactly the wrong tone for someone already on edge.

I rebuilt the system around a disciplined core — navy, goldenrod, burgundy, and powder blue — and then did the unglamorous work nobody puts on a portfolio: I defined every functional state, in light and dark mode, against WCAG AA. Error, success, warning, and info each got a value that passes contrast for aging eyes and carries the right emotional weight. Errors stopped shouting. Success stopped being an afterthought.

The principle underneath it: warmth and legibility are not a trade-off. A color can feel human and still clear a 4.5:1 contrast ratio. Most brands pick one. I made the system do both, because for our users, an unreadable warm color is just a barrier wearing a nice sweater.

Principle 2

A Voice That Sounds Like a Person

Type was where the "borrowed lab coat" feeling lived most. A safe, generic sans-serif told users nothing about who we were — and worse, at the sizes and on the screens our audience actually used, it was just hard going.

I paired Bricolage Grotesque for display with Inter for everything that has to be read rather than felt. Bricolage gives headlines a slightly imperfect, human quality — it has hands — which is exactly the register I wanted for a brand that sits with people in hard moments. Inter does the quiet heavy lifting: it stays legible at small sizes, on cheap screens, in bright waiting-room light.

The discipline was in the restraint. I built a type scale with deliberately few sizes and generous defaults, because the fastest way to make an older user feel stupid is to make them squint. The headline can have personality. The body text's only job is to never get in the way.

Principle 3

We Designed for One Person, Not "Users"

The single most useful thing I did all year wasn't visual. It was deciding to stop designing for "users" and start designing for one specific woman in her sixties in a rural county, helping her husband through treatment, comfortable enough with a phone to text her grandkids and not much further.

Every decision got run past her. Is this tap target big enough for her? Does this empty state explain itself, or does it assume she already knows what a "dashboard" is? When I reworked the dashboard, I wasn't chasing density or dashboards-as-power-tools; I was making sure the next right action was the most obvious thing on the screen, and that the care-partner path was as dignified and clear as the patient's. Features like the Appointment Notebook and Symptom Tracker stopped being a menu of capabilities and started being a hand on the shoulder: here's what to do next.

This is the part I'd most want a hiring team to notice. Taste is necessary but not sufficient. The brand matured not because it got prettier, but because every choice was accountable to a real human being who would actually be holding the phone.

Principle 4

One Brand, Every Surface

A brand that only holds together on the homepage isn't a brand; it's a screenshot. The real test came when the same identity had to survive a phone, a marketing site, an onboarding animation, and an eight-foot banner.

On mobile, I built our onboarding as a Rive animation — a wave sequence driven by a state machine — so the brand could move with the same calm it had standing still, and so first-time users felt something warm before they felt anything functional. On the web-to-mobile handoff, I sweated genuinely small things, like a download modal that centers an email-yourself-the-link option over the QR code, because our users are more likely to open a link on their phone than to know what to do with a QR square.

Then came ASCO 2026 — our brand's first time at full physical scale, a quad-fold brochure system for the field's biggest oncology conference. Print is where a digital brand's bluffs get called: DPI, bleed, color that behaves on paper instead of a backlit screen. Watching the same navy and goldenrod hold their dignity across a printed spread, a phone, and an animated splash was the moment the maturation felt real. The brand had grown up enough to leave the house.

Conclusions

A year of this kind of work rarely produces one tidy launch moment. It produces a product that quietly stops embarrassing itself. Still, a few things moved:

The larger shift was cultural. Maturing the brand turned design at Manta from a coat of paint applied at the end into a point of view applied at the start — accessible by default, accountable to a real person, consistent across every surface. We didn't get colder as we got more credible. That was the whole point.