School of Nursing Centennial Rebrand

The Challenge
As the University of Wisconsin–Madison School of Nursing approached its centennial, they wanted to emphastically break from an image of nursing that was anchored to an outdated, overly narrow perception focused almost exclusively on bedside care. That framing obscured the school’s leadership in research, technology, policy, and community impact, and limited how prospective students, partners, and funders understood its value.

Just as critically, the school was clear on one point: they educate nurses—they don’t train them. Their work is rigorous, intellectual, and expansive, and the brand needed to reflect that.

What We Did
We reframed nursing itself, grounded in the school’s own conviction about what nursing is.

We built a flexible, future-facing brand system that expands the narrative from care delivery to systems-level influence, elevating science, innovation, and leadership alongside compassion. From the bedside to the lab, the community, and beyond, the messaging makes clear that nursing is both a practice and a discipline.

The system was designed to flex across audiences and contexts, with modular messaging and visuals that maintain cohesion while allowing for range. More than a set of guidelines, it became a toolkit that empowered the school to tell a bigger, more ambitious story, consistently.

Impact
The new brand firmly shifted nursing from a supporting function to a driving force in the future of healthcare.

At the same time, it aligned audiences around a more expansive, academically grounded identity, positioning the school to attract students, partners, and investment aligned with that vision well beyond its centennial moment.