How Red Antler’s brand helps Rovex’s robot feel familiar in hospitals

Rovi, the first product from Rovex, is what the hospital logistics platform describes as the first robot built to move patients. Rovi attaches to any stretcher and moves stable patients through the hospital on its own without major changes to the building’s infrastructure. New York-based Red Antler was commissioned to create the brand strategy, identity, messaging, digital and visual design, and art direction for the company. “When we started working with Red Antler, the product and the mission were already very real,” explains Co-founder & CEO David Crabb. “We knew the problem we were solving, we were building the technology, and we had a strong point of view about what Rovi should become inside a hospital. What we did not yet have was an identity for Rovex as a whole or a clear voice that matched that ambition. We wanted a brand that could live comfortably in a hospital without looking like traditional medical equipment. Rovi and the brand needed to feel approachable to patients and clinical staff, credible to hospital leadership and distinct enough to become a recognisable member of the hospital environment.” “When transport stalls, the effects ripple through care outcomes, staff bandwidth and patient experience,” Red Antler notes. That insight became the basis for the brand idea – ‘Keep care flowing.’ “Because Rovi carries people rather than linens, medication or supplies, trust had to be built into the brand from the beginning,” explains Senior Designer Tatsuya Kurihara. “Patients are already in a vulnerable state, while hospital staff and leadership need to know that new technology can integrate safely into an environment where reliability matters enormously. The brand therefore needed to feel believable, safe and inevitable, rather than futuristic for the sake of being futuristic.” In Kurihara’s words, the identity is “advanced enough to represent where hospital logistics is going, but human enough to belong beside the people it is ultimately designed to serve.” For Red Antler, the creative challenge was making Rovi feel like “a known quantity in an environment that had never seen anything like it.” To make Rovi reassuring, the studio leaned into the robot’s preparation. Rovi completes millions of virtual transports through a simulated replica of the hospital before its first real one, and Red Antler’s visual system “carries that reassurance into every touchpoint.” The path-based visual system starts from the complexity of hospital logistics – the bottlenecks and “disconnected moments that can interrupt the flow of care,” Kurihara notes. “We began representing those individual problems as dots, then connected and organised them through a continuous path. The idea is that Rovex brings structure to that complexity, connecting what feels fragmented and creating a clearer, simpler flow through the hospital,” he continues. That connected-dot motif informs the symbol, iconography, data visualisations and holding devices – the graphic shapes that frame content. Rovex’s symbol is based on the ‘R’ of its name and is built from the same dots. It appears on Rovi itself, on apparel and on an app icon. “We engineered the mark to retain the same character at both large and small scales, simplifying and balancing its forms so the ‘R’ remains recognisable and legible even at its smallest size.” The Rovex wordmark uses custom typography. “Soft curves are balanced with structured edges, giving the mark a character that feels approachable yet precise. The lowercase ‘r’ was a deliberate choice to reinforce that sense of approachability, while its simpler form creates a more natural relationship with the other letterforms,” Kurihara reveals. The open spacing gives the wordmark “clarity and presence across different scales,” from billboards and environmental graphics to presentation screens and digital interfaces. The palette pairs an electric yellow, which signals presence and movement “without feeling like an alarm,” with muted ink and a family of soft gradients. “Across the system, yellow is used intentionally rather than everywhere. It acts as a signal: drawing attention to key moments, information or expressions of movement and flow.” Red Antler set the art direction for the photography and footage on Rovex’s website. Before real hospital footage was available, the studio created AI-generated reference imagery and motion studies to guide the subject matter, composition, lighting, environment, movement and tone. “The goal was to avoid imagery that felt overly staged, futuristic or like generic healthcare stock photography,” Kurihara explains. “We wanted the brand to feel grounded in the reality of hospitals: real environments, real people and real moments of care.” Red Antler reports that Rovex’s website, which the studio redesigned, has grown monthly traffic by 130% and tripled lead capture, with the average visit lasting 2:55 against 1:46 on the old site. “We built the voice around one shared idea: keeping care moving. What changes by audience isn’t the personality of the brand, but the benefit we bring forward,” Kurihara details. For hospital staff, the line is ‘Rovi keeps care moving, no matter your transport realities,’ alongside Rovex’s claim that staff can be trained in 20 minutes. The screens that Red Antler designed for patients inside the hospital read ‘Rovi gets you care sooner, and home faster.’ On those screens, the connected-dot motif becomes “more functional, using the path to communicate the patient’s journey and sense of progress,” Kurihara concludes. Red Antler Rovex