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Case study 04 · Concept · Brand extension · Photography

The mark goes inside the instrument — and the instrument names the product.

Visova — health benefits administration software. They had a mark; what they didn't have was a way to look like anything.

A health benefits software platform — claims, enrolment, compliance, routing. Enterprise software for an industry that mostly looks like a spreadsheet. They already had a mark. What they didn't have was a way to look like anything.

I built the expression system around it: one idea, executed across the entire product line. It ran on their site for ten years.

My role
Art direction, conceptual design, photography — my own credit line at the time. The butterfly mark was theirs and I did not draw it. I built everything around it.
Client
Visova — health benefits administration software, Scottsdale AZ. The mark is still in service today.
In production
Ten years in production — checked snapshot by snapshot in the Internet Archive rather than remembered.
The decision it turns on

The mark goes inside the instrument — and the instrument names the product. Every frame is the same recipe: a precision tool, shot close, high-contrast black and white, with the client's mark as the only color in the picture. Never laid on top of the shot. Sited where the object's own logic already puts something — the jewel in a watch movement, the membrane in a stethoscope, one key on a keyboard.
Then the tool does a second job. Calipers measure, so the calipers are Testing Tools. A wrench secures, so the wrench is Security and Compliance. Headphones listen, so the headphones are Customer Service. Ten product pages, each with its own instrument. One picture tells you it's Visova, and which part of Visova you're standing in.

A stethoscope lying across a white Mac keyboard, photographed close in high-contrast black and white. The Visova butterfly mark sits inside the stethoscope's diaphragm, where the membrane would be, and its red is the only color anywhere in the frame.
enrollment managementMedicine and computing in one frame. The stethoscope head is the only round thing in the picture, so the mark goes where a membrane goes. Nothing is composited onto the surface — the object was dressed and lit for it, which is why the mark takes the same specular highlight as the chrome around it.
Vernier calipers photographed close in high-contrast black and white, jaws open across a scale, with the red Visova butterfly mark sited on the sliding scale as the only color in the frame.
testing toolsCalipers measure. The product page is automated regression testing — measuring whether the result matches what was expected.
A heavy drop-forged pipe wrench photographed against white in high-contrast black and white, with the red Visova butterfly mark sited on the flat of the jaw as the only color in the frame.
security & complianceA wrench tightens. The page is HIPAA security and confidentiality. The heaviest object in the campaign, on the page about holding things shut.
A pair of studio headphones photographed close in high-contrast black and white, ear cup toward the camera, with the red Visova butterfly mark sited in the center of the cup as the only color in the frame.
customer serviceHeadphones listen. The page is call tracking and service dashboards.
The exposed movement of a mechanical watch photographed in extreme close-up in high-contrast black and white, with the red Visova butterfly mark on the bridge plate and a single red jewel glowing in the gear train — the only two points of color in the frame.
claim routingA movement routes. Escapement, gear train, one jewel. The mark's red is picked up by a real jewel in the mechanism — the only frame in the set with two points of color, and the object supplied the second.
A 2019 archived screenshot of the Visova website's Testing Tools page, showing the site header and navigation, the page title, the calipers photograph at left and a column of body copy about automated regression testing at right.
as it ranThe same calipers, live on the client's site five years later. Recovered from the Internet Archive — the site has since been rebuilt and the campaign is gone from it. Shown at the size it was captured: it's a record that it shipped and kept shipping, not a portfolio render. That distinction is the entire value of this frame.
The agency years — The Path →