This is not an advertising feature. It’s an advertising design feature.

Recently, my New York design team completed a refresh of the great NY-based challenger brand, Help Remedies, founded by Richard Fine CEO and Help’s Creative Director, Nathan Frank. To be asked to work on it was a real pleasure, as we were following in the collective creative footsteps of both Richard and Nathan, Chapps Malina and Little Fury, all of whom I have enormous respect for their design sensibilities. However, when we sat there looking at this tiny but hugely charismatic and powerful brand, which is changing consumer healthcare perceptions across America, the question that came to me and Mark Christou, my then Creative Director, was ‘What’s wrong?’.

Ultimately, the answer was not much. We built very nicely on an established visual architecture and strengthened product-type differentiation. Through typography enhancements and new iconography, Help now stands out more and people can identify what’s inside each pack more easily. These are incremental steps, but they really needed thinking about in order to expand drugstore distribution. I won’t pretend that we didn’t try to push the brand further in our design exploratory, but I accept that a close-in step was the correct choice to help Help maximize its visual presence at this point in its evolution and the Creative Director’s decision was correct in guiding the solution in this direction rather than trying to reinvent it.