WORK / LUMEN HEALTH
Lumen Health
A dark-first brand and marketing site for a mental wellbeing app that needed to feel calm and credible at the same time.
BRAND IDENTITY · APP UI · MARKETING SITE
OVERVIEW
Calm and credible, built for 11pm.
Lumen is a seed-funded London startup building an app that helps young professionals manage stress, sleep and burnout through short daily check-ins, guided audio sessions and a mood journal. Its content is written with a clinical psychologist and reviewed by an NHS-trained advisory panel, and the public launch was nine weeks away.
CHALLENGE
Somewhere between hospital and meditation poster.
Beta testers liked the product but called the look “a bit hospital” or “a bit meditation poster”. Clinical apps feel cold and wellness apps feel vague, and Lumen needed to sit between them. The clinical advisor ruled out crosses, brains, hearts, lotus flowers and sunrises, the team was tired of yellow and sun motifs, and legal could not allow promises like “cure” or “fix”.
APPROACH
Designed dark-first, for tired eyes.
Most use happens at night, so the brand starts in deep indigo instead of being converted to dark mode later. Light shows up as a soft teal glow rather than a sun, which keeps the idea behind the name without leaning on yellow.
The interface is designed for one hand in bed, to WCAG 2.2 AA: large touch targets, high-contrast text and no colour-only status. Red is kept for crisis support only, and help is always one tap away, with Samaritans on 116 123 front and centre.
The copy follows the voice Lumen asked for: steady, kind and specific. “You might” instead of “you should”, no exclamation marks in session content, and nothing that promises to cure or treat.
INSIGHTS: YOUR WEEK AT A GLANCE
GUIDED SESSIONS FOR STRESS AND SLEEP
VOICE AND ACCESSIBILITY, MADE FOR TIRED EYES AND ONE HAND
CRISIS SUPPORT, ALWAYS ONE TAP AWAY
TOOLS USED
Figma
Brand, app UI and the five-page marketing site designed in Figma, dark-first, for iOS, Android and web.