Healthcare · paediatric publishing
2020–21
Paediatric Guide
For a child, a hospital is hostile territory: unfamiliar corridors, white coats, procedures nobody has explained at their eye level.
The project was developed from the inside: as a member of Ribera Salud's communications team, the work covered character design, the illustration of every page and the layout of the guide.
Paediatric Guide
Superheroes against the fear of the white coat.
Healthcare · paediatric publishing
2020–21
The project was developed from the inside: as a member of Ribera Salud's communications team, the work covered character design, the illustration of every page and the layout of the guide.
Challenge
Ribera Salud needed a guide for its paediatric patients that would make that journey understandable — and, as far as possible, less frightening.
Strategy
The strategy was to change the child's role: from a patient enduring a process to a protagonist overcoming it. Each stage of the hospital journey was reframed as a scene in the mission, with a superhero to introduce it and see it through.
Gamification wasn't decoration, it was the mechanism: if the child knows what comes next and has seen it beaten on the page, the waiting room weighs less.
Identity
The child doesn't walk into the clinic as a patient — they walk in as the hero.
The characters were designed to be approachable before spectacular: brightly coloured superheroes with rounded shapes and legible gestures, meant to be adopted at first sight by a child in a waiting room.
System
The guide works as an editorial piece: a sequence of illustrated pages following the real order of the journey — arrival, waiting, consultation, procedure — so that reading it anticipates the experience.
All the material was drawn and assembled in Photoshop and Illustrator, keeping characters and settings consistent from the first page to the last.
Applications
The guide was conceived for the points of the journey where waiting and fear bite hardest: paediatric consultations, waiting rooms and medical visits, with the characters accompanying the child at every stop.
Outcome
The guide walks the paediatric patient's full itinerary page by page, with the superheroes as the connecting thread. It belongs to the illustration work developed during the Ribera Salud years, alongside the hand-hygiene comic, and is published on Behance.
The guide was rolled out across several Ribera Salud centres to a positive reception from children, families and medical staff: the superhero narrative helped the youngest patients internalise care and safety rules without experiencing them as impositions.
The project proved that design adapted to its audience can humanise a hospital stay: effective communication put at the service of the youngest patients' emotional wellbeing.
