McKesson

The Power for Better Data

Building a cohesive, seamless, and dynamic brand identity for a quantum leap in healthcare data analysis and coordination

Project
Fuse Brand Identity

Medium
Integrated

Agencies
EPAM (San Francisco) - Voice Refinement
Acclaro (Atlanta) - Expo Booth

Role
Design Direction
Brand Strategy
Identity Design
Visual Design
Verbal Strategy & Tagline

Year
2017

Objective
As McKesson prepared to launch Fuse, its groundbreaking patient data platform, corporate leadership needed a brand experience that captured its transformative impact on healthcare. The challenge was twofold: establish Fuse as a leader in health data integrity while ensuring it stood apart as a neutral, standalone platform that could attract partnerships across the industry. The brand had to reflect both the technological innovation and the guiding philosophy behind its development.

Solution
Fuse made its debut at the 2017 HIMSS global conference as a bold, independent brand, visually linked to McKesson only through its primary color scheme. We created a distinctive identity—including a new logo, typography, and a refined voice—that embodied Fuse’s mission and vision of healthcare's future. By standing apart from McKesson, Fuse gained the flexibility to reach a broader audience and establish itself as a leader in health data integrity. The launch reinforced McKesson’s commitment to innovation while ensuring Fuse could thrive as its own entity.

Finding Fuse

While exploring potential names for Fuse, we created a series of mood boards to capture the brand’s emotive and strategic territory—drawing from physics, biology, music, art, and architecture. Across these disparate fields, one visual kept appearing: the hexagon. At first, it seemed incidental. But as the pattern persisted, it became impossible to ignore.

The hexagon is nature’s shorthand for efficiency—found in everything from honeycombs to carbon molecules to planetary storms. In his book, A Beginner’s Guide to Constructing the Universe, Michael S. Schneider wrote, “Hexagons contain a message that efficient structure, function, and order are happening.” That insight resonated deeply, perfectly aligning with Fuse’s brand promise: clarity, connection, and purposeful design.

That recognition of visual symbolism and brand relevance—where form met meaning—became the catalyst for the brand’s identity system, anchoring the logo and visual language in a shape that had been hiding in plain sight all along.

Discovery & Construction

The hexagon, chosen as the core of the logo's design, revealed more than structural beauty—it offered a modular system grounded in proportional geometry, capable of expressing balance, hierarchy, and flow. To ensure this form aligned with Fuse's mission of data harmony across clinical networks, we drew from another recurring symbol in our early explorations: the yin-yang. Its emphasis on duality and equilibrium became a guiding influence, reinforcing Fuse's role as a connector of complex, interdependent health systems

Logo Typography

After exploring numerous type options, Biome by Carl Crossgrove emerged as the foundation for the wordmark. Its polished, futuristic form—with subtle humanistic curves—offered the perfect counterbalance to the logomark’s strong geometry. The resulting wordmark created visual equilibrium while nodding to Fuse’s connection to patient care, grounding the brand in both precision and warmth.

Color Palette

One of the primary ways we linked the Fuse identity to the parent McKesson/RelayHealth brand was through color. We adopted most of the original palette, augmenting it with new tints, shades, and an additional color, aqua. The additions created a broader pool to draw and develop an engaging identity and afford new experiential tones to augment the customer journey.

Fuse Logo System

To reinforce Fuse’s strategic positioning and enhance the customer experience, we developed a modular logo system built around its four core capabilities: interoperability, storage, scalability, and health data curation. Each variant uses color as a functional signifier, helping users quickly identify and navigate platform features across complex healthcare environments. The system includes versions for light and dark contexts, including a tinted utility set designed for data visualizations and interface elements—supporting brand presence in a more embedded, context-aware way.

Typography

As a data platform, Fuse required typography optimized for user interfaces and scalable across contexts. With this in mind, I researched fonts that would render well at all scales, from mobile screens to billboards. Noto Sans—designed by Google in collaboration with Monotype—offered a clean, humanist structure and an expansive, multi-lingual character set that ensured clarity, accessibility, and global usability.

Feature Set Patterns

Extending the visual system around the Fuse feature set, we developed a series of five abstract patterns—each aligned to a core product capability—alongside one representing the platform as a whole. Drawing from the same hexagonal deconstruction used in the logo, we expanded the grid into a deeper tessellation framework inspired by the natural symmetry of snowflake formation. This approach enabled us to create a modular set of seamless, scalable patterns. Each was paired with a signature brand color and crafted for flexibility across digital, environmental, and informational contexts.

Imagery

To support Fuse’s positioning as a future-focused, data-driven platform, we developed a vibrant, expressive, and symbolic imagery system. Rather than relying on literal visuals, the system uses metaphor to communicate tone and functional promise, with each image reflecting its core brand attributes—speed, security, interconnectivity, and clarity—reinforcing Fuse’s role as a trusted partner for healthcare data integrity.

The Fuse Brand Guide

To ensure consistency across all applications, we created a comprehensive 42-page guide detailing how to build brand-aligned Fuse experiences. In addition to visual identity standards, the guide included clear guidance on voice and tone, preferred terminology, and editorial style—providing partners, vendors, and internal teams with the tools to communicate the brand effectively and cohesively.

“Chip was purposeful about all the aspects of the [Fuse] brand—he was careful, thoughtful, and inspired. He forged the brand experience into one that resonated with our target market.”

Cynthia Pols
Vice President, Cost of Care & Enterprise Analytics Strategic Initiatives
Elevance Health

Brand Activation

The Fuse Dashboard

In tandem with the brand identity development, I worked closely with the RelayHealth applications team as a brand advisor. Providing insight into color, typography, and iconography use, we established a comprehensive design system that became the foundation for the Fuse dashboard interface, ensuring the product reflected the brand with clarity, usability, and cohesion.

The Fuse Booth for HIMSS 2017

The Fuse booth was designed to spark anticipation and invite meaningful interaction, more like an exclusive destination lounge than a traditional trade show presence. Influenced by 1960s architecture with a touch of Kubrickian flair, the structure echoed the brand system's clean futurism and aspirational tone.

Spacious seating zones, a concierge desk, and a staffed refreshments bar set the tone for a hospitality-first experience. A towering video board enveloped the space at its center, wrapping visitors in a looped audiovisual narrative showcasing all things Fuse. The main screen featured customer testimonials, platform insights, and the Fuse launch video. Above, the canopy's screen played a slow, cinematic slideshow of imagery that inspired the logo and identity system, subtly reinforcing the brand's conceptual depth with atmospheric motion.

Previsualization rendering (courtesy of Acclaro)

Previsualization rendering (courtesy of Acclaro)

Outcome

Fuse emerged with a brand that balances precision and personality, built to support a complex healthcare data ecosystem while remaining accessible, scalable, and clear. From strategy through implementation, the system empowered teams to deliver a consistent experience inside the product and beyond.