Smileno

A family lives inside the tooth

Client: Smileno
Sector: Dental healthcare
Role: Identity design and art direction

Most dental brands look like a dentist. This one looks like the reason you go.

Shown as portfolio work — client details available on request.

The brief

A dental clinic treating adults and children, wanting one identity across both. The tension is in the category: clinical trust and emotional warmth pull in opposite directions, and most dental brands resolve it by picking a side.

Go clinical and you get the same blue-and-white sterility as every practice on the street. Go warm and you undercut the thing a patient is actually buying, which is confidence that the person holding the drill knows what they are doing.

The idea

A family lives inside the tooth.

Two parent figures shape the outer silhouette. A child and a smile sit at the centre. Read one way it is a family; read another it is a molar. Neither reading has to be explained, and the second one arrives about a second after the first — which is what makes it stick.

The Smileno symbol: two parent figures drawn in a single continuous line form the outer silhouette of a tooth, with a child’s head and a smile curve resolving at the centre

Four ideas resolve into one mark — parents, tooth, smile, child — and the mark is drawn as one continuous gesture rather than assembled from parts. That is what keeps it away from the hard clinical geometry the category defaults to: a line that never breaks reads as protective rather than surgical.

Sketch exploration for Smileno — hand-drawn passes working from tooth outlines toward a single shared family gesture

Warmth and precision, held together

The palette does the work the symbol cannot: obsidian and champagne gold against porcelain, with a clinical grey for the functional layer. Gold on near-black is what stops a healthcare brand reading as a discount clinic, and it is doing the “premium” job so the symbol does not have to.

Typography is split by role. A warm serif leads — it carries the establishment and the reassurance — while a clear sans handles everything functional and bilingual: forms, directions, prices, opening hours.

The brand device — black and white marble with fine gold linework, used to frame information across print and packaging

Where it lives, which is the point

The category test for a clinic identity is not the logo. It is whether the system survives a medical history form — the least glamorous, most-used object in the building.

Bilingual business cards in the obsidian edition, black marble with gold veining, Arabic on the reverse

Prescription pad carrying the same system into a functional clinical document

Medical history form — the least glamorous object in the practice, and the real test of whether the system holds

Patient welcome kit, gathering the printed pieces into one handover

From there it runs outward: uniforms, interior signage, the reception desk, the shopfront.

Staff uniform carrying the mark at small scale

Reception experience — the identity applied to the first thing a patient sees inside

Exterior façade with the lockup at building scale

And into social and outdoor, where the same high-contrast obsidian-and-gold system has to work at a glance rather than at reading distance.

Social post applying the identity to a single message on the obsidian ground

Outdoor placement — the mark and one line, sized for the street

What shipped

One symbol, a bilingual type system, an obsidian-and-gold palette with a marble-and-gold device — applied across stationery, business cards, prescription pads, medical history forms, a patient welcome kit, uniforms, interior signage, reception, the façade, social and outdoor.