To celebrate the 65th anniversary of its founding – and in recognition of its evolution from a small country hospital to a regional health system with more than two dozen locations – the organization rebranded itself in December 2019 as St. Tammany Health System, although the hospital would retain the St. Tammany Parish Hospital name.
To mark the occasion, it also reinvented its logo.
That new logo, initially developed by an outside agency but refined by Tim San Fillippo, the health system’s senior marketing specialist and brand manager, still used intertwining hearts as a focal point, although they were reimagined dramatically to project a more contemporary feel.
“We needed to maintain a sense of continuity from what had been established while giving attention to how the new design would perform across traditional and new media,” San Fillippo said in explaining the thought behind the new logo.
It wasn’t just the hearts that were updated. So were the fonts used to spell out the organization’s name.
The font Alverata Bold, designed by Gerard Unger in 2014 and drawing from Romanesque Europe, would be used for the words “St. Tammany.” Beneath it, in a smaller point size and utilizing all capital letters, the words “Health System” would appear in Filson Pro, part of a font family designed in 2014 by Oliver Gourvat.
The overall goal was to project a more modern feel. San Fillippo said he thinks the new logo nailed it.
“Now that the logo has been in service for nearly three years, I’m confident that we made the right decision,” he said. “The health system logo has an easy-to-read, modern sensibility that has cascaded into other projects such as refreshed monuments and all-new pole banners. What was once an organization with a dated logo that was hard to render at times now boasts a versatile brand image that can be clearly presented as a miniature digital icon or enlarged for an illuminated sign.
“Will it last 17 years? Who knows? But if I were a betting man, I’d say yes.”