A bilingual identity concept for Etihad Hospital in Sharjah. One word, unity, shaped into a logo, a type system and brand guidelines built to grow.
In late 2024, a healthcare group in Sharjah asked us for something more lasting than a logo. Their medical centre already ran a long list of departments. Now they were building a hospital under a new name, opening first with gynaecology, general practice, surgery, ICU and NICU, with dentistry and dermatology to follow. What they needed was a foundation: a logo, typography and brand guidelines that every future department could build on. We presented this concept in January 2025.
The name did half the work. Etihad means union. It is the idea the UAE was founded on, when seven emirates became one country, and people there see the word every day, from the national airline to the new Etihad Rail.
So we drew a union. Seven figures, one for each emirate, stand around a shared centre with their arms raised. From across the street the mark reads as a sun. Up close, you see people. There is no cross, no heartbeat line, no stethoscope. A hospital is full of people looking after people, and we wanted the mark to say that first.
The name sits in Arabic and English side by side, drawn with equal weight so that neither looks like a translation of the other. The colour is a clean medical teal, softened by a warm sand, so the brand feels calm rather than clinical. That matters in a building where most people arrive worried.
Because the hospital will keep adding departments, we built the guidelines as a system. A sign for the NICU today and a dermatology clinic next year follow the same rules, so the place always looks like one hospital.
Then we tested it where it would actually live: on the front of the building, as an app icon on a phone, and stitched onto clinical uniforms. It held up at every size, from a facade to a home screen.
