Case Study
WTF is AuDHD?
WTF is AuDHD? is an independent podcast made by New Zealand sisters Ellie and Paige, both diagnosed late with autism and ADHD. Eighty-odd episodes in, the show unpacks what AuDHD actually looks and feels like from the inside — built on lived experience rather than clinical distance. Diagnosed late, here to educate.
Why did they need us?
The podcast had an audience and a point of view long before it had a brand. It was growing across Spotify, YouTube, Instagram and TikTok at once, and every one of those places wanted something different — square cover art, channel banners, thumbnails, vertical clips. Each episode was being designed from scratch, and none of it looked like it came from the same show.
- Be unmistakable in a podcast feed at thumbnail size
- Carry the humour without undercutting the credibility of the subject
- Work across Spotify cover art, YouTube channel assets, thumbnails and social
- Give Ellie and Paige templates they can run themselves, every week, without a designer
- Feel like a community to belong to rather than a clinical resource
The challenge
Neurodivergence content tends to land in one of two visual clichés. There’s the clinical — muted blues, puzzle pieces, infographic sincerity — and there’s the chaotic, where visual noise gets used as shorthand for ADHD. Neither suited a show that is genuinely funny and genuinely well-researched at the same time. The identity had to be loud enough to stop a scroll, and clear enough to be read easily by an audience that includes a lot of people for whom visual clutter is hard work.
How did we do it?
We started with the thing that was already working: the way Ellie and Paige actually talk. Blunt, funny, unfiltered, and never at anyone’s expense. The brand needed to sound like two sisters on a couch, not a health campaign.
The name does the heavy lifting, so we put it front and centre. wtf is au-dhd? set in a soft rounded script with a heavy outline, sticker-style, so it holds up at any scale. The hyphen isn’t decorative — it splits the word the way the sisters explain it on the show. Autism plus ADHD.
The brandmark is a pink brain with a green lightning bolt through it. One image, both halves of the diagnosis, no explanation needed.
Why did we design it this way?
Colour. Hot pink and teal at full saturation, held together by black and white. The palette is deliberately loud, but every combination was chosen for contrast as much as energy — headlines stay legible at small sizes and on a phone in daylight, which matters more than usual for this audience.
Typography. A heavy condensed sans for statements, used in short bursts. Never a paragraph where three words will do. It gives the layouts their volume without turning them into noise.
Assets. A chilli, an asterisk, flames, grid paper, handwritten marker notes. These behave like stickers rather than decoration — they punctuate a layout instead of filling it, which keeps the energy high and the reading easy.
Templates. The episode number sits inside a browser window device. One element changes per episode, everything else holds. That single decision is what makes a weekly show sustainable to design.
Recognisable at thumbnail scale. Podcast art competes as a small square on a crowded screen. The outlined script and the pink brain hold their shape at the size people actually see them, which is where most podcast branding falls apart.
Built for weekly output. Templates for Spotify covers, YouTube thumbnails and social mean the show can publish on schedule without a designer in the loop — and without the brand drifting a little further off course every week.
Funny without being unserious. The tone signals that this is a show you’ll enjoy, while the structure and clarity signal that the information is worth trusting. Both had to be true at once.
The result
WTF is AuDHD? now looks like one show wherever it turns up — Spotify, YouTube, Instagram, TikTok — instead of four loosely related ones. The identity gives the sisters something ownable in a category full of sameness, and a system they can run themselves week after week.
Most importantly it does the thing the podcast does: it takes a subject people are often handed clinically, and makes it feel like something you’re part of.
