hearthplace.ca
Hearth Place offers a unique wellness experience that combines embodied, expressive, playful therapeutic approaches in a stunning natural setting to help you rediscover your true self. Therapist dean diamond combines a broad education in embodied techniques with a deep grounding in place and land, centering his practice both physically and spiritually beside the Cowichan river in beautiful Quw'utsun territory.
Combining usability and accessibility with a flexible content approach. Dean is not your conventional talk therapist, offering modalities that dissolve the overly formal constraints of therapist and patient, office and chair, question and answer. We needed to convey what it feels like to work with him while guiding visitors through familiar and accessible web patterns. We also wanted to build in ways for the site to grow and change as dean creates new offerings and builds his practice.
Visitors to the site need to see right away that dean's approach is tailored for the often-underserved queer, gender non-conforming, neurodivergent and dis/abled communities that dean both serves and belongs to. We focused on these keywords in the design phase:
Dean came to us with a beautiful brand kit complete with a suite of illustrations that reflect the natural setting and soothing tone of Hearth Place. Our task was to translate it into a beautiful and flexible design and choose an accompanying content management system.
Hearth Place is a one-person show, and dean was slowly returning to work after a significant leave, so the system needed help to simplify the process of running the practice, not complicate it. We chose Prismic content management system for its clean dashboard, flexible custom content blocks, and manageable learning curve. We paired that with our favourite the flexible and fast NextJS frontend framework
Dean's preferred format for training materials was video, so we scheduled a series of live Zoom tutorials that were recorded for future reference and stored in Google Drive for easy access.
