How I Redesigned Innovative Vascular Institute’s Website (and Built the Running Man)
A behind-the-scenes look at rebuilding ivisatx.com, from a blank page to the man who runs across it.
When I stepped into marketing at Innovative Vascular Institute, the website had a job it wasn't doing. IVI is a minimally invasive vascular practice in San Antonio led by Dr. W. David Long, a board-certified interventional radiologist. The care is genuinely different: outpatient, no hospital stay, most people back to their lives the same day. The old site didn't make anybody feel that. It read like a list of procedures.
So we started over. This is the whole process: the idea, the brand system, the running man, and how it went from my laptop to the live site.
Start with the feeling, not the procedures
Vascular patients don't search for "endovascular intervention." They search because their legs hurt when they walk to the mailbox, or because they were told amputation was the only option. What they actually want back is their life.
That became the headline before anything else existed: Your legs have places to be.
Everything on the homepage had to serve that line. Minimally invasive. No hospital stay. Back to your life the same day. Most new patients seen within the week. Four promises, repeated everywhere, worded the same way every time, so a patient never has to wonder which version is true.
Building the brand system
Before designing a single section, I locked the system so every page would feel like one place:
Type: Poppins Extra Bold for headlines (confident, modern, readable at a glance) and EB Garamond for body copy (warm and human, so medical information doesn't feel cold).
Color: deep navy, cobalt blue, and IVI teal pulled straight from the logo's gradient, with a soft blush and plenty of white so the page can breathe.
The mark: IVI's logo is a three-stroke "W" that fades from teal to blue. I treated it like a graphic, not just a logo, which ended up mattering a lot for the hero.
The running man
I wanted the very first thing you see to move, and to move with you.
The hero is a runner mid-stride on a deep teal-navy field. As you scroll, he runs: he travels from behind the headline out to the right side of the screen, and as he goes, his vascular system lights up in glowing blue, through his legs, his arms, his chest. At the same time, IVI's giant "W" rises up behind him. By the time he lands in place, you've watched healthy blood flow light up a body in motion, which is exactly what the practice does, without a single word of medical jargon.
A few of the decisions that made it work:
Scroll is the throttle. The animation is tied to your scroll position, not a timer. Scroll fast and he sprints; stop and he holds. It makes the visitor part of the motion, which is the whole message: you're the one who gets to keep moving.
Frames, not a video. The runner is built as a sequence of frames drawn onto a canvas, so it stays sharp at any screen size and responds instantly to scrolling instead of buffering like a video would.
The veins are the story. I didn't want blood or anatomy-textbook visuals. The glowing blue reads as energy and circulation, and it lines up with the brand blues so it feels like IVI rather than a hospital diagram.
The W carries the brand. Instead of slapping the logo in a corner, the mark becomes the stage he runs across. Brand recognition without a sales pitch.
Lock what works. Once the first frames of the run were right, we treated them as untouchable. Every later round of edits worked around them so we never broke the part people loved.
Designing the rest of the homepage
Once the hero set the tone, the rest of the page had one job: get a worried person to the right answer fast.
Find care by condition. A row of cards for PAD, vein disease, hemorrhoids, erectile dysfunction, leg pain and limb salvage, enlarged prostate and uterine fibroids, each with a real photo and a plain-language label, so you can click what you're feeling instead of decoding procedure names.
Interactive trust pillars. The reasons to trust IVI are interactive panels you can explore, not a wall of bullet points.
Real voices. Patient testimonials and the staff who answer the phone, because in healthcare people are choosing who as much as what.
Calls to action that don't shout. "Schedule a consultation" and "Explore conditions," everywhere you'd naturally look for them.
How I built it: mockup first, then handoff
I designed and built the homepage as a single, fully self-contained page, with every image, font and animation packed into one file. That sounds technical, but it meant one thing for the team: Dr. Long could open a link on his phone and see the real thing, running man and all, not a flat picture of a website.
I published each round to a private preview link, and we worked section by section. I'd share a draft, give options where there was a real choice to make, and adjust only what needed adjusting rather than rebuilding what was already working.
When the homepage was approved, I put together a full handoff package for the development team: the brand system, a map of every section, an index of every image with SEO alt text written for it, and a production to-do list. Then the site was built out for real and went live at ivisatx.com.
Cleaning house before launch
A redesign isn't just new paint. Before and after launch I went through the site page by page:
Every condition card links to its own dedicated page instead of dumping patients on a generic menu.
The core promises use the same wording everywhere, from the hero to the FAQ.
Phone numbers, links and footer details are consistent and actually work.
Every image has descriptive alt text, which helps search engines and patients using screen readers.
Beyond the homepage
The website became the hub for everything else we make at IVI: service videos for each condition, Spanish-language and Spanglish videos for the families who'd rather hear it en español, a PAD walking-program booklet, social content, and an IVI magazine whose articles double as blog posts. One look, one voice, one set of promises, everywhere a patient might meet us.
What I'd tell anyone redesigning a medical website
Lead with the life, not the procedure. Patients buy getting their life back.
Let one idea do the heavy lifting. The running man says "minimally invasive, back on your feet" before anyone reads a word.
Make motion mean something. If it moves, it should move for a reason.
Show real previews to real decision-makers. A clickable mockup gets better feedback than any slide deck.
Protect what works. Iterate around your best ideas, not over them.
Go see him run at ivisatx.com.
If your brand needs a website that actually feels like something, brand photography, video, or creative direction, that's what I do.
Katie Coffee is a Nashville-based brand and talent photographer, video maker and creative director, and Marketing Manager at Innovative Vascular Institute in San Antonio.
