Sant Pau

Rebranding of an historical hospital

Cliente
Hospital de Sant Pau

Services
Branding 
Communication
Digital
Scenic branding
Strategy 
Narrative

Sector
Health

The Hospital de Sant Pau is a living history of the city of Barcelona. Since 1401 it has always been at the forefront of Catalan healthcare. It was at Sant Pau that the first heart transplant was performed, where the first emergency department in Spain was created, the first medical school and the first coronary unit.

For obvious reasons, from its birth as the Hospital de la Santa Creu, a small health centre located in the centre of Barcelona, to its transfer to the current large modernist building, the hospital has multiplied and diversified its activity, giving rise to multiple initiatives and programmes. On the one hand, these initiatives and programmes coexisted without visual coherence. On the other hand, atomisation disintegrated and weakened the Sant Pau brand.

Sant Pau therefore drew up a new strategic plan and, with the aim of concentrating all its activities in a single entity, created a new umbrella brand: Sant Pau Campus Salut.

Knock joins the project at this point. We were the agency responsible for planning and executing an extensive strategic and branding exercise that made sense of the strategic plan: to create a coherent brand architecture, we redesigned the umbrella brand and created new visual identities for the different divisions of the campus.

We have built a new transversal narrative that unites all the brands in a single universe and highlights the history of the institution. The aim is to recover its personality and project it into the future.

Visual DNA

In order for the Sant Pau Campus Salut brand to relate coherently with the other previously designed identities that were different from each other, we carried out an exercise that we could call visual harmonisation.

The Hospital de Sant Pau’s first identity, created 600 years ago, was based on heraldry. Since then, successive updates of the image have simplified it. Redesigning these identities represented an opportunity to visually reinforce the concept of history. Instead of following inertia, we have looked back, recapturing the heraldry in a perceptible way while adapting it to the needs of digital.

The colour spot that divides the shield, the adjustment of the lines and the negative use of a reinforced kicked cross, allows us to claim the personality without compromising its behaviour on screen or when it needs to adapt to very small sizes.

The new chromatic range inspired by the colours of the mosaics, stained glass and hydraulic tiles so characteristic of the Sant Pau Art Nouveau site. It’s not just a tribute, it’s about reinforcing the brand by staying true to its essence, from the narrative to the visual identity.