EARNINGTRUSTATSCALE

Trust was the design problem. The NIH All of Us program had $600 million and a mandate to enroll one million Americans, at least half from communities with every reason to distrust medical institutions. My team at Wondros was their creative partner, and I joined as Senior Art Director during the pre-launch phase. The task was to design a visual identity and participant experience that could earn it.

Client

National Institutes of Health

Agency

Wondros

Role

Senior Art Director

Year

2017–2020

Scope

$600M federal initiative

Results

participants enrolled during pre-launch and early enrollment. 80% from underrepresented communities, exceeding program targets.⁵

institutional partners using the design system.

won against two designers in Wondros' homepage competition, then won again against three designers in SCRIPPS' competitive redesign.

Today, All of Us has enrolled more than 800,000 participants. Over 80% are from communities historically underrepresented in biomedical research. More than 440,000 have shared electronic health records, and over 6,000 approved research projects are using the dataset.³⁴

All of us Homepage — Prelaunch Hero

The Problem

People visiting the website were confusing the research program with a healthcare provider and calling in to ask about doctors' offices. The visual identity didn't distinguish research enrollment from healthcare delivery. For a program asking people to hand over their most personal data, that confusion was actively eroding trust.

And trust was the entire design problem. Women and communities of color were historically excluded from clinical research. Federal law mandating their inclusion didn't exist until 1993.¹ The Tuskegee syphilis study withheld treatment from Black men for forty years.² NIH was explicit: if the design didn't account for that history, the program would fail. This was an organizational problem carrying the weight of decades of institutional betrayal.

All of us Homepage — Before

All of us Homepage — After

My Approach

I wasn't originally on this project. While the team was deep in the All of Us pre-launch, I was art directing another Wondros engagement: a visual identity and design system for the University of Pittsburgh's Clinical and Translational Science Institute. But I had a clear vantage point into All of Us, and I could see the problem described above before the team inside it could name it.

After that project wrapped, I was asked to take a crack at the homepage redesign. Wondros brought in two other designers to compete. I delivered three concepts, each built around two questions: How do we increase sign-ups? How do we address misinformation and distrust?

The work was presented internally, then shared with NIH. They selected my first concept and asked for a hybrid solution that merged the new direction with existing site elements. That hybrid became the foundation for everything that followed.

Black-and-white photography to strip away clinical polish. If the identity felt like it belonged to a hospital system, it would trigger exactly the institutional distrust the program needed to overcome. Removing color did something else. It shifted focus to texture. Skin, hair, pores, imperfections. When you desaturate the photo, you stop seeing demographics and start seeing the common threads that make us human.

Visual choices have consequences beyond aesthetics. I deliberately selected photography subjects who did not look like the expected faces of medical advertising. One of the lead images featured a Native American man. In a country where First Americans remain among the most underrepresented communities in biomedical research, putting that face at the front of the program carried its own meaning. A promise.

Rainbow color palette. Government programs look like government programs: navy, red, white, and a seal. That visual language carries every association the program needed to escape. A rainbow palette immediately broke the pattern. It signaled openness without targeting any single demographic, and it told people before they read a word: this program is built for you.

Humanist illustrations: simplified figures that could represent any race or ethnicity. The system was flexible enough that anyone could see themselves in the program.

The language toggle. The program was bilingual. I placed the Spanish/English toggle in the universal navigation, giving it visual weight equal to the All of Us logo. No one requested this. The invisible decisions are where design either earns trust or quietly undermines it. No brief covers them. In a program asking Spanish-speaking communities to trust a federal institution with their health data, their language had to be primary. The placement said, before a single word was read, that this program considered all participants equal.

Black-and-white photography to strip away clinical polish. If the identity felt like it belonged to a hospital system, it would trigger exactly the institutional distrust the program needed to overcome. Removing color did something else. It shifted focus to texture. Skin, hair, pores, imperfections. When you desaturate the photo, you stop seeing demographics and start seeing the common threads that make us human.

Visual choices have consequences beyond aesthetics. I deliberately selected photography subjects who did not look like the expected faces of medical advertising. One of the lead images featured a Native American man. In a country where First Americans remain among the most underrepresented communities in biomedical research, putting that face at the front of the program carried its own meaning. A promise.

Humanist illustrations: simplified figures that could represent any race or ethnicity. The system was flexible enough that anyone could see themselves in the program.

Rainbow color palette. Government programs look like government programs: navy, red, white, and a seal. That visual language carries every association the program needed to escape. A rainbow palette immediately broke the pattern. It signaled openness without targeting any single demographic, and it told people before they read a word: this program is built for you.

The language toggle. The program was bilingual. I placed the Spanish/English toggle in the universal navigation, giving it visual weight equal to the All of Us logo. No one requested this. The invisible decisions are where design either earns trust or quietly undermines it. No brief covers them. In a program asking Spanish-speaking communities to trust a federal institution with their health data, their language had to be primary. The placement said, before a single word was read, that this program considered all participants equal.

Black-and-white photography to strip away clinical polish. If the identity felt like it belonged to a hospital system, it would trigger exactly the institutional distrust the program needed to overcome. Removing color did something else. It shifted focus to texture. Skin, hair, pores, imperfections. When you desaturate the photo, you stop seeing demographics and start seeing the common threads that make us human.

Visual choices have consequences beyond aesthetics. I deliberately selected photography subjects who did not look like the expected faces of medical advertising. One of the lead images featured a Native American man. In a country where First Americans remain among the most underrepresented communities in biomedical research, putting that face at the front of the program carried its own meaning. A promise.

Rainbow color palette. Government programs look like government programs: navy, red, white, and a seal. That visual language carries every association the program needed to escape. A rainbow palette immediately broke the pattern. It signaled openness without targeting any single demographic, and it told people before they read a word: this program is built for you.

Humanist illustrations: simplified figures that could represent any race or ethnicity. The system was flexible enough that anyone could see themselves in the program.

The language toggle. The program was bilingual. I placed the Spanish/English toggle in the universal navigation, giving it visual weight equal to the All of Us logo. No one requested this. The invisible decisions are where design either earns trust or quietly undermines it. No brief covers them. In a program asking Spanish-speaking communities to trust a federal institution with their health data, their language had to be primary. The placement said, before a single word was read, that this program considered all participants equal.

The System at Scale

The System at Scale

This was a system: photography, illustration, color, and typography that needed to flex across 100+ institutional partners without breaking. If the system needs explaining, it's already failed. I built it to be self-evident and to outlast me, and it did. The system survived a creative director transition and national scaling. When SCRIPPS later took over the website and held a competitive redesign (again pitting my direction against three other designers), the visual identity I'd established won again.

Research All of Us

All of Us also needed a home for the researchers using the dataset. Different audience, different problem. The Researcher Hub took the same visual identity and refined it into something more functional and tool-like, without losing the warmth that earned participants' trust in the first place. Same system, different register.

Paid Media and Email

The system had to live everywhere the program lived. Hundreds of banners, emails, OOH placements, and animated HTML units, in English and Spanish, across institutional partners and direct-response channels.

Traveling Exhibition

The program needed to reach people who weren't searching for it. The Mobile Unit was a traveling exhibition: a trailer of interactive kiosks, a Guest Book, and a video experience that let people see themselves reflected in the program before deciding to join. I led the UX, visual direction, and prototyping, carrying the identity off the screen and into a space people walked through.

All of us Guest Book

All of us Guest Book

All of us Video Kiosk

The Mobile Unit toured the country. Local news picked it up along the way. This clip is one example of the system working in the wild: kiosks, signage, photography, all doing their part.

Second Redesign

Three years on, the SCRIPPS team in San Diego took over the site and held a competitive redesign of their own. The visual identity I'd established went up against three new directions and won again.

A system earns trust by outlasting the person who built it. This one did.

Credits

Executive Digital Producer: Jennifer Eno

Executive Director of Digital: Brad Combs

Creative Director: Jason Bacasa

Director of Product Design: Lucinda Brown

Senior Art Director: John Hultman

Digital Producers: Melanya Torosyan, Michael Hopkins Sr.

Project Manager: Amy Barton

UX Strategy and Design: Brigid Buckman

UI Design: Terry Ma

Copywriter: Ryan Curtain

Design Team: Steven Rahbany, Brett Meier, Vanessa Ong, Ebony Darby, Amanda Cabasa

Agency: Wondros

Client: National Institutes of Health

¹ NIH Revitalization Act of 1993 (P.L. 103-43), signed June 10, 1993. NIH Policy and Guidelines on the Inclusion of Women and Minorities as Subjects in Clinical Research. orwh.od.nih.gov

² CDC, "The U.S. Public Health Service Untreated Syphilis Study at Tuskegee." Study conducted 1932—1972. cdc.gov/tuskegee/about

³ Duke University Medical Center Library, "All of Us Research Program" guide. Updated February 6, 2026. 804,000+ participants, 440,000+ electronic health records, 568,000+ biosamples. guides.mclibrary.duke.edu

⁴ SDSU Library, "All of Us Researcher Workbench" guide. "Information about over 6,000 research projects using All of Us data." library.sdsu.edu

⁵ Denny, J.C. et al., "The All of Us Research Program," New England Journal of Medicine, 2019. 230,000+ participants enrolled by July 2019; 80% from communities underrepresented in biomedical research.

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7/1/2026

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