NUTRILATINA
Starting a nutrition practice again, in a new country.
Overview
Starting again in Vancouver
Starting again in Vancouver
Healthy eating is hard to sustain when the country changes. So is a career.
Ximena had built one in Mexico — a nutrition degree, hospital cardiac rehabilitation, her own clients. After moving to Canada she took a holistic nutrition diploma in Vancouver, but the practice itself had to begin again.
Working with a strategist who led strategy and copy, I designed and built the site over eight weeks.
Challenge
One practitioner, four fields, two languages
One practitioner, four fields, two languages
Ximena works across hormonal health, pregnancy and postpartum, heart and metabolic conditions, and eating well after arriving in Canada — six consultation packages in all, in English and in Spanish.
Someone arriving from a search has one of those concerns, not four. The site had to let them find their own before they read a paragraph.
Design Decisions
Designed to be scanned before it is read
Designed to be scanned before it is read
Every decision below answers the same question: how does a stranger find their own part of this practice in the first few seconds?
Four doors in the first screen
Under the headline sit four labelled icons: Holistic Approach, Personalized Nutrition, Hormonal & Gut Health, and English/español. A visitor can place themselves before scrolling into the services at all.
Language as a feature, not a setting
Bilingual sites usually hide language in a switcher. Here it appears three times — in the hero sentence, as one of the four pillars, and in the navigation. For someone who searched “nutrióloga en Vancouver”, it is the reason to stay on the page.
Illustration where a photograph would lie
Hormonal health, pregnancy, metabolic conditions: photographed, these turn into clinical stock or someone else’s body. They are drawn instead, in one line-and-wash style, and photography is kept for Ximena and for food. The Rest / Nutrition / Movement diagram on About follows the same rule.
Keep the empty slot visible
One package had no copy yet at launch. Rather than drop to five cards, the grid keeps six and marks the last one “Coming soon”, so the row stays balanced and the gap reads as planned rather than missing.
Visual Direction
Warm ground, one quiet green
Warm ground, one quiet green
A cream ground rather than white, so the pages read warm without turning pastel. One muted green carries every heading and button. Watercolour leaves sit in the margins at low contrast, close enough to the ground that they never compete with the text.
Serif headings for the steadiness of a clinical practice, sans-serif for navigation. The brief had two edges to avoid: the cold of a clinic, and the pink-and-orange of a wellness brand aimed at women.
Final Design
Four pages, four jobs
Four pages, four jobs
Health information never sits in a Squarespace form; booking runs through Practice Better instead. The site’s job ends at the decision to reach out.
Reflection
Let people sort themselves
Let people sort themselves
With four fields and two languages, the instinct is to write one sentence that covers all of it. A sentence like that ends up describing nobody.
Four labels in the first screen did the work that no paragraph could. I now look for the place where a visitor can choose, before I look for the words that explain.