Finger Lakes Neurology Logo
Finger Lakes Neurology is a new, independent clinic in Canandaigua, New York. Lead by Dr. Eugene Tolomeo, the practice delivers diagnosis, treatment and ongoing management for patients with multiple sclerosis, migraine and other neurological conditions. The clinic has affiliations with the hospital systems in Rochester, but is a private practice. Finger Lakes Neurology is the sister practice of FLX Medical Infusion, which is conveniently located across the street.
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Logo Design Project
The Finger Lakes Neurology logo design project began in the winter of 2025. The Finger Lakes Neurology team knew what it was looking for in a logo design. The team turned first to A.I. software to conceptualize the logo. Predictably, the A.I.-generated logo designs lacked the style, uniqueness and quality the practice desired.
The attempt to use A.I. to create a medical company logo, however, wasn’t a complete wash. Typing A.I. prompts allowed the team to refine what the practice was looking for. Of equal importance, the A.I.-generated results showed what the team was not looking for. The A.I. experiment having run its course, Insomniac Studios was asked to design the logo, website and support materials. Shortly thereafter, however, the logo design project went on hiatus as the team’s focus shifted to the federal and state regulations and requirements needed to establish a new medical company.
Logo Design Brief
During the months-long hiatus, the healthcare practice’s name changed, but the fundamental concept behind the logo design did not. The Finger Lakes Neurology leadership team knew that it wanted to combine an image of a human brain to represent neurology with the Finger Lakes, which would represent the practice’s service area.
Attempts to use A.I. software to combine these two core concepts resulted in the image below. While A.I. was able to reproduce a reasonable facsimile of the human brain, it completely missed the mark regarding the Finger Lakes. Instead, the A.I. software produced a logo befitting a technology company. The A.I. software also rendered several technical issues into the logo design, most notably the smudge-like blurs in the logo circuitry and the illegible numbers at the bottom of the logo. These might represents the A.I. software’s best attempt at an established date, but appear to be comprised of only the number two. The sub-mark between the dates is a smudged and unintelligible mass that adds nothing to the logo design.
Logo Design Process
The first task in the logo design process was to examine the landscape of competing neurology practices in the Rochester, New York, and Finger Lakes region. The preponderance of neurologists working in the area are affiliated with the two largest hospital systems: the University of Rochester Medicine and Rochester Regional Health. This meant that those neurologists utilized the University of Rochester Medicine and Rochester Regional Health logos and brand identities and were therefore outside the project’s scope. While it is an affiliated partner of both the University of Rochester Medicine and Rochester Regional Health hospitals, Finger Lakes Neurology is an independent practice.
With the major hospital network neurologists eliminated, the search produced fewer than ten independent practices in Rochester, Canandaigua and Geneva with their own visual identities. One practice used unformatted text instead of a logo while another used a formatted typographic logo.
All of the remaining independent neurology practices with their own distinct visual brand identity used some version of a stylized human brain as the basis for their logo. This meant the Finger Lakes Neurology logo would have to work twice as hard as its competitors’ brain logos to be successful.
Insomniac Studios pitched a whopping eight brain-based logo concepts to the Finger Lake Neurology team. In the end, the team wanted what the team wanted and the winner was the most traditional and literal visual depiction of the human brain crossed with the New York Finger Lakes as-seen-from-outer-space satellite view.
On paper, merging a wrinkly human brain with the cat-scratch outlines of the New York Finger Lakes seemed like an easy task. However, the logo design presented a unique and unforeseen challenge. The Finger Lakes run north/south, while the largest creases in the human brain are lateral, or side to side. Adding a visually vertical element to another element that was mostly understood horizontally would take some work, especially when the logo needed to be reproduced at a small scale both in print and online.
The first step was to remove superfluous Finger Lakes. Including all the Finger Lakes in the logo design was deemed unnecessary for two reasons: one logical, the other practical. Finger Lakes Neurology serves Rochester, Canandaigua and Geneva, New York and the surrounding Finger Lakes area. Limiting the number of Finger Lakes in the logo design visually represents the geographic service area. Secondly, fewer lakes meant the remaining lakes would be larger and more likely to be recognized as Finger Lakes. Also, fewer Finger Lakes in the final logo design meant the logo could have fewer details and therefore be easily reproduced in smaller formats. The lake shapes were widened and each lake’s locations adjusted slightly to fit the logo design’s needs. The lakes needed to function as logo, after all, and not a map.
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