Ryse Therapy
Brand identity · Web · Interaction
Year
'26
Role
Brand Identity, UX, Visual Design, Web Design, Build
Tools
Figma · Claude · Claude Code · Midjourney · Adobe Firefly · Vercel · GitHub
Ryse Therapy is a Seattle telehealth practice for individual and couples counseling. The project was a full brand identity and a hand-directed, four-page website built to make reaching out for therapy feel less daunting — warm, human, and genuinely calming rather than clinical.
A calm, dandelion-led identity system carried across brand, copy, and a custom-built site.
Challenge
Ryan Bolding, a licensed clinical social worker, was running his new practice on an inherited template site that felt generic and clinical — the opposite of how he actually works with clients. It didn’t communicate warmth, didn’t establish trust, and gave first-time visitors no sense of the person behind the practice.
The challenge was to build credibility for a brand-new solo practice while making the single most intimidating action — reaching out for the first time — feel safe. That meant designing for an anxious first-time visitor, not just a polished homepage.
Before / After — Homepage
Approach
The work ran in two arcs: first a brand and content foundation, then a custom-built site that turned that foundation into an experience. Every creative decision stayed human-led; AI handled the friction of production.
The website experience and transformation remain the emphasis; process artifacts support the story without taking over the page.
01 · Brand & wordmark
The identity centers on a dandelion — letting go, growth, resilience — paired with a calm teal-and-cream palette and an italic Cormorant Garamond display face reserved for emotional, voice-led moments. Italic carries feeling; roman handles function. The wordmark went through repeated reduction to land on something quiet and confident rather than decorative.
02 · Information architecture & content
Before any UI, the site was reduced to four pages — Home, Services, About, Privacy — mapped to how an anxious visitor actually moves: is this person safe → what do they treat → can I trust them → how do I start. Copy was rewritten throughout to be plain, warm, and reassuring, replacing clinical language with the way Ryan actually speaks.
Information Architecture Diagram
03 · UI & atmosphere
The site is built as one cinematic, scroll-driven world: a parallax sky-and-city hero, hard horizontal color cuts between sections, and a 3D dandelion that drifts and morphs as you scroll. Motion is used sparingly — enough to feel alive and calming, never distracting from the message.
Design System Snapshot
Business Card / Brand Collateral
Responsive Design
Final experience across desktop and mobile viewports.
04 · AI-Assisted Build
The site was hand-coded in vanilla HTML, CSS, and JS with no framework, built through a directed AI workflow: design decisions made in conversation, turned into precise prompts, executed by Claude Code, then reviewed screenshot-by-screenshot on a live URL. Midjourney generated the hero cloud imagery; Adobe Firefly produced the dandelion and CTA video. The role here was director — prompting, judging, and deploying.
Directed AI build workflow
Outcome
The result is a live, hand-built site that reframes a clinical template as a calm, human first impression — clear about who Ryan is, what he treats, and how to begin. The brand system — type, color, the dandelion motif, the voice — extends cleanly across the site, business cards, and a campaign kit.
Beyond the deliverable, the project demonstrates an end-to-end modern workflow: brand thinking, IA, content strategy, UI, and an AI-assisted design-to-deploy pipeline owned by one person.
Challenge
Ryan Bolding, a licensed clinical social worker, was running his new practice on an inherited template site that felt generic and clinical — the opposite of how he actually works with clients. It didn’t communicate warmth, didn’t establish trust, and gave first-time visitors no sense of the person behind the practice.
The challenge was to build credibility for a brand-new solo practice while making the single most intimidating action — reaching out for the first time — feel safe. That meant designing for an anxious first-time visitor, not just a polished homepage.
Before / After — Homepage
Approach
The work ran in two arcs: first a brand and content foundation, then a custom-built site that turned that foundation into an experience. Every creative decision stayed human-led; AI handled the friction of production.
The website experience and transformation remain the emphasis; process artifacts support the story without taking over the page.
01 · Brand & wordmark
The identity centers on a dandelion — letting go, growth, resilience — paired with a calm teal-and-cream palette and an italic Cormorant Garamond display face reserved for emotional, voice-led moments. Italic carries feeling; roman handles function. The wordmark went through repeated reduction to land on something quiet and confident rather than decorative.
02 · Information architecture & content
Before any UI, the site was reduced to four pages — Home, Services, About, Privacy — mapped to how an anxious visitor actually moves: is this person safe → what do they treat → can I trust them → how do I start. Copy was rewritten throughout to be plain, warm, and reassuring, replacing clinical language with the way Ryan actually speaks.
Information Architecture Diagram
03 · UI & atmosphere
The site is built as one cinematic, scroll-driven world: a parallax sky-and-city hero, hard horizontal color cuts between sections, and a 3D dandelion that drifts and morphs as you scroll. Motion is used sparingly — enough to feel alive and calming, never distracting from the message.
Design System Snapshot
Business Card / Brand Collateral
Responsive Design
Final experience across desktop and mobile viewports.
04 · AI-Assisted Build
The site was hand-coded in vanilla HTML, CSS, and JS with no framework, built through a directed AI workflow: design decisions made in conversation, turned into precise prompts, executed by Claude Code, then reviewed screenshot-by-screenshot on a live URL. Midjourney generated the hero cloud imagery; Adobe Firefly produced the dandelion and CTA video. The role here was director — prompting, judging, and deploying.
Directed AI build workflow
Outcome
The result is a live, hand-built site that reframes a clinical template as a calm, human first impression — clear about who Ryan is, what he treats, and how to begin. The brand system — type, color, the dandelion motif, the voice — extends cleanly across the site, business cards, and a campaign kit.
Beyond the deliverable, the project demonstrates an end-to-end modern workflow: brand thinking, IA, content strategy, UI, and an AI-assisted design-to-deploy pipeline owned by one person.
ALIF