A practice, built end to end.

A friend, a book, and a blank page

Vanessa Blackstone wrote The Pain Reprocessing Therapy Workbook and led the Pain Psychology Center in Los Angeles. In 2026 she decided to open her own practice in London. She had the clinical side cold. What she didn’t have was any of the rest: a name people could see, a website, and some way for eight people to run a practice that wasn’t a pile of Google Docs, spreadsheets, and WhatsApp threads.

That’s the whole brief. It isn’t a website project or an app project. It’s a practice, and a practice needs a front door and a desk behind it. I built both, on one identity, and I still run them. This is the freelance work I can show in full, because Vanessa said yes.

The identity: calm on purpose

People arrive at a pain practice tired and sceptical. They have usually tried everything. So the brand had to do the opposite of a clinic: no white, no blue gradients, nothing that smells of a waiting room. The mark is a PPC monogram with wildflowers growing through the letters, in a deep teal. Around it sits an earth-tone palette, sand and amber and clay and rose and leaf, which I first drew for the dashboard’s twelve-stage pipeline and then pushed out to the public site so both surfaces wear the same weather.

Type is Fraunces for headings and DM Sans for everything else, on a cream ground with a film-grain texture over the whole site. The rule I gave myself: if the dashboard dictates the tone, the site can’t drift into generic wellness. It didn’t.

The front door

The US practice’s site lived on a page builder with separate desktop and mobile layouts. The UK site is one responsive codebase, static, fast, and hosted on Firebase behind Cloudflare. Every page is written under a vocabulary Vanessa and I set on day one: clients, not patients; providers, not therapists; sessions and support, not treatment. PPCUK launches as pain psychology-informed coaching and education, and the words have to say so on every page.

The part I care about most is the contact form. When someone writes in, the message doesn’t go to an inbox somebody forgets to check. It lands on the platform as an enquiry, matched against existing files, ready to be claimed by whoever is working the desk that day. The site and the platform are one path, and the person in pain never has to say the same thing twice.

The desk

The platform is where the practice actually happens. An enquiry becomes a pre-intake file. The file books a discovery call, on video or audio, with a Meet room minted at booking. After the call the client signs a two-document pack, pays, and is booked, and the order is enforced on the server, not by a checklist. From there a client moves through twelve stages in four phases, intake to matching to sessions to outcome, on a tracker every role can read at a glance.

Every tab and filter lives in the URL, so a link to a file is a link to that exact view. Nothing moves you off the page: files open in place, drawers stay put, and the person on the other end of the phone never watches the coordinator hunt for a screen. Vanessa runs it from a tablet, so it had to work at that size first.

Privacy was the design constraint

Vanessa’s one hard line: this must never become a clinical record system. So the platform stores the least it can. No session notes, anywhere. Client data is light and scoped by role, and the scoping is enforced in the database rules, not just hidden in the interface. A coach can only query their own clients. Notification emails carry a first name and a serial number, never the record. Card numbers never touch the platform at all.

Everything runs in Google’s London region, so UK data stays in the UK. The operations page shows the whole wiring, plainly, because a practice that handles pain has to be able to explain where a client’s information lives.

Money and paper

Stripe is the truth about payments. Wise is the truth about the bank. The platform is a mirror of both and never holds money. Sessions are £175, packages of eight are £1,400, and each delivered session releases the provider’s share into a payout run that is approved in the platform and paid in Wise by hand, with the paperwork done for you.

Agreements go out through DocuSeal from inside a file: the client coaching agreement and a consent to coaching and data use, the lawyer’s final wording, signed in one sitting. Every email the practice sends is written as plain text and comes out branded, so a new template costs a paragraph, not a designer.

Run like a product

A practice changes every week, so the platform ships every week. There is a What’s new page with every release, and a platform log where feedback goes in with its source: Anne, by email, on a Tuesday. When Vanessa walked a coordinator through a real intake and wrote me what she saw, the call sheet was rebuilt around her notes within days. The version number is in the corner of every screen. It reads v5.28 as I write this.

That loop is the actual product. Anyone can ship a dashboard. The thing a small practice needs is someone who will keep designing it against how the work really goes.

What it proves

This is the clearest case I have for what I do now. I designed the identity, wrote the copy, built the site, built the platform, wired the email and the domains and the payments, and I still run all of it. One person, one taste, from the mark on the door to the rules in the database. If you are building a small operation that needs to feel like a real product on day one, this is what that looks like.