Designing for dignity

Ryan Frost, executive creative director at Landor, argues that successful brands of the future will be those that dignify people.

Working on healthcare branding sharpens your attention to something the design industry has championed but has failed to become a C-suite strategic imperative. You encounter people navigating moments they never asked for: diagnosis, treatment, recovery. And they’re navigating experiences designed without them in mind. The signage assumes familiarity. The language assumes literacy, fluency, calm. The check-in process assumes someone who isn’t frightened. In all these assumptions, dignity leaks out.

Dignity is a word we rarely use in branding, which is strange given how much of our work shapes how people feel about themselves. Not how they feel about the brand. That’s the part we obsess over. How they feel about themselves while interacting with it. Whether they feel capable or confused. Respected or processed. Like a person or like a problem to be solved.

There’s a question worth asking about every brand experience: where in this interaction might someone feel small? We map journeys and identify friction, but friction isn’t indignity. You can make something frictionless and still leave people feeling diminished.

Consider the categories where dignity has been systematically designed out. Healthcare is just one. Financial services, where those who most need help encounter language that presumes either sophistication or stupidity. Beauty, where the promise of confidence arrives wrapped in imagery that undermines it. Government services, where requesting assistance is engineered to feel like confession. The apps work fine. The wayfinding is clear. But something essential is missing.

What’s missing is empathy, the recognition that people bring their full selves to every interaction: their anxieties, their histories, their sense of worth. A patient checking in for a scan isn’t just completing a task. Design that ignores this doesn’t just miss an opportunity; it inflicts something.

The work of restoring dignity begins with subtraction, but it is mastered through holistic orchestration. It's about removing the jargon that protects institutions, yes, but it's also about designing for calm – attuning the auditory landscape to remove anxiety-inducing noise, crafting tactile interfaces that feel reassuring, not clinical, and creating visual systems that guide with clarity rather than overwhelm. It's a multisensory signal that says, 'We see you. We respect your time and your state of mind.’

This is where brand transformation matters beyond the boardroom. A rebrand is an opportunity to audit not just what an organisation looks like, but how it treats people at scale. To ask not only “what do we want to be known for” but “what do we want people to feel about themselves when they encounter us?”

The brands that earn genuine loyalty won’t just be the ones that know their customers best. They’ll be the ones that dignify them. That’s not a sentiment. It’s a design specification.