The Design Business Show 203: Bridging The Gap Between Graphic Design and Health with Nhat Tran

Nhat is the Director of Bridge Creations, he established the business in 2021 through a background of emotional trauma with discrimination, abuse, and workplace toxicity, but contrary built potent health with a desire for sports. The two fields led to opposing outcomes of good and bad health, valuing the need for adequate well-being with picturing a deduction of health implications. He combines his health background with his graphic design experience to envision visual collateral to aid, encourage and empower healthy living.

Nhat graduated from the University of Canberra in 2021 with a Master of Design Strategies; he also holds a Bachelor’s and an Honours degree in graphic design, specializing in visual communication, branding, design-led innovation, and information graphics.

Here’s what we covered on the episode:

The Why Behind Bridge Creations

• The story of Nhat’s university assignment, which made him realize the impact graphic design has on health, and the article he wrote with his colleagues called Service Design Thinking For Social Good
• Nhat has had many health issues since he was around 12 years old, dealing with racism, school-yard bullying, and cyberbullying, and for 4 years, was a victim of a toxic workplace
• Why Nhat is passionate about improving health with graphic design so hopefully, in the future, health issues can be reduced
• How graphic design can communicate facts and health information more effectively – covid is a great example because when you scroll on social media, you see posts about daily numbers or graphics on how to stop the spread
• Nhat’s assignment combined two areas, health and graphic design – the assignment was a brochure on how to prevent childhood obesity that communicated strategies, was persuasive, informative, and engaging 
• Current clients of Nhat’s come from networking events in Canberra, Australia, which is one of the most innovative cities in the world and Australia
• Each month, Nhat attends a networking group called the Canberra Innovation Network, which includes many different entrepreneurs and investors, which is how he has gotten his current clients 
• Even if a company has nothing to do with health, Nhat is good at finding some small components – for example, one of his recent clients has a company that uses nursery rhymes to help school kids with vocabulary learning, and Nhat was able to find some health-related elements like mental and social health to help improve their wellbeing and learning
• At this stage in his business, Nhat is trying to build evidence through the clients he has so that in the future, he can have more proof behind his process and send proposals out to health-related entrepreneurs 
• Nhat shares another client example where they changed their logo to help improve awareness of their business and significantly improved their marketing content 
• A lot of Nhat’s current clients are entrepreneurs because they can lack the graphic design skills needed to effectively communicate their message, which is how Nhat helps 
• Nhat is most passionate about physical health in the industry, and before his university project on childhood obesity, he did a hypothetical promotion on health for university students to improve exercise, which helped him shape his business niche
• Because of Nhat’s sports background, he has much experience with the physical, mental, and social benefits that physical health has 
• In the future of his business, Nhat hopes to see people applying more visual collateral because, while in school, he realized how underestimated and underappreciated graphic design is

The Future of Bridge Creations + Design Tips 

• Many people think graphic design is the cherry on top, but Nhat believes it’s the opposite because when you look at marketing, people tend to focus more on images and videos, which is why it’s so important to implement 
• In the future, Nhat would like to assist clients with anything from their marketing content to their branding to their website and would like to see health service providers better improve the usage of graphic design because he would love to see a reduction of health issues 
• Nhat focuses on static images and photos but can consult and identify strategies for video content as well and, most recently, has worked on logos for clients, along with other promotional materials 
• In the future, Nhat would be interested in doing public speaking to share his passion for graphic design and health, along with sharing his own story 
• Nhat likes to include the why behind his business on his website and in the pitches he gives because his personal experience played such an important part in shaping his business 
• Evidence building is one of the most important things Nhat has learned since starting his business – it’s not enough to just say how great your service is; you need to be able to show the impact it has had for past clients 
• One of the biggest mistakes people make when it comes to health and design is designing something just because they think it’s right; you need to make sure you’re inclusive and make sure you understand your audience so you can pinpoint their pain points in the promotional content
• The name of Nhat’s business, Bridge Creations, came from his thinking about bridging the gap between health and graphic design 
• Check out Nhat’s website and connect with Nhat on LinkedIn

 

Links mentioned:

 

Bridge Creations

Service Design Thinking For Social Good

Connect with Nhat on LinkedIn

 

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