Introducing Cool Beans - A Passion Project Dedicated to Raising Awareness About Kidney Disease
Cool Beans Logo Design. The name is inspired by the connection between kidneys and beans and tagline “keepin’ it renal” hints at the playfulness of the project, while denoting the hyper-focus on renal disease and diet.
I couldn’t be more excited to launch Lettering Works’ newest passion project, Cool Beans, today as National Kidney month kicks off. This project is centered around growing awareness for kidney disease and the impact it has on so many across the world. I strongly believe in doing work that you are passionate about and while I mostly wish that kidney disease wasn’t such a personally relevant topic for me, it’s been part of my life for as long as I can remember.
Kidney disease is unfortunately very prevalent in my family. My grandma and her sisters all had polycystic kidney disease (PKD) as well as my dad, his brother, and male cousins. The disease has alternated each generation from females to males and back, leaving myself and my female cousins with it as well.
While I’ve known the majority of my life that I would likely have the disease, it wasn’t until last September that I was officially diagnosed with polycystic kidney disease myself. I’d spent my first 26 years living a pretty normal, unobstructed life (aside from my major back surgery in 2007). Watching my close family members experience and struggle through dialysis and transplants has made me very familiar with the impact of the disease.
Polycystic kidney disease or PKD is an inherited disorder in which clusters of cysts develop primarily within the kidneys, causing them to enlarge and lose function overtime.
My personal journey with receiving my diagnosis started last July when I felt a hard mass on my left side. After two ultrasounds, a CT scan, and colonoscopy with no real answers, I was told that I had PKD and referred to a specialist. My nephrologist (kidney specialistic) confirmed the hard mass that I felt was actually my enlarged kidney. My left kidney is enlarged and has many cysts already, including a 4.4 cm (1.7 inch) cyst - which is likely what I can physically feel on my left side. Normal kidneys are about the size of your fist; polycystic kidneys can grow to as large as the size of a football
Fortunately, I still have a high level of function at this point and am considered Stage 1. My current treatment plan consists of a high blood pressure medication and modifying my diet with the goal of slowing the progression of my PKD. Additionally, I have to complete a MRA brain scan to check for abnormalities and aneurisms, as there is an increased risk in PKD patients.
There is currently no cure for polycystic kidney disease. There is one medication on the market called JYNARQUE (tolvaptan) that has been studied in trials for several years and recently became FDA approved. Others, like Falcon, are still in the trial period, making treatment options pretty slim. I will likely need a kidney transplant in the future and am committed to being proactive and getting involved with the community early, so I can ensure the best possible outcome for myself as well as share my findings with others affected by PKD.
I’ve had to start watching my sodium intake, increase my water consumption, and begun the journey of educating myself even more about the disease and its impact. I was initially told that I might need to be on a renal diet - meaning I’d have to watch my sodium, potassium, and phosphorus intake. Researching renal diets quickly became frustrating because of the difficulty of identifying what I could and couldn’t eat. This exact pain point sparked the idea for Cool Beans.
Developing a passion project is a great way to bring personal interests into your work. Passion projects follow a very similar creative process to typical client projects and may even have more research and planning because of they are often very open-ended.
To make the researching process more enjoyable and less daunting for myself, I began to brainstorm back in December how I could develop a creative passion project around what I knew I needed to do for my personal health. I began by developing a restaurant concept around a renal diet because I needed motivation to take control of my health in a way that tied into larger business goals of getting into more restaurant branding.
I learned that developing a menu for a renal diet is no easy task and also that dietary recommendations are highly dependent on the stage of kidney disease. So I hired a dietitian - Melanie Betz, a registered renal dietitian at UChicago Medicine, to develop a menu. We decided to focus on those with kidney disease who do not yet have decreased kidney function. The ultimate goal with this foundational piece is to address the horrible feeling of “only being able to eat white rice” which many newly diagnosed kidney disease patients might feel when embarking on learning about all that renal diets entail.
The menu design became a key part of this project’s concept. The final menu design will be shared in a future blog post.
I imagined creating a piece that could provide a glimmer of hope to those discouraged and overwhelmed by their new diagnosis and dietary restrictions. An encouraging piece to prevent others from feeling hopeless and confused, like I was. One that is beautifully designed and brings a welcomed playfulness into the scary reality that is any potentially fatal disease.
The project quickly grew to so much more as I identified new opportunities to build pride and community around those affected by kidney disease. I am excited to explore designing products for those affected by the disease and for living donors who donate their own organs to the cause. There is potential to partner with non-profits and others that care about fighting for a cure, especially because of the limited funding available to non-profits. In true passion project fashion, I’ve chosen to build my vision for the project first and then connect with these organizations to ensure that my work can serve my goals before being directed by anyone else.
I chose to launch this project in March to align with Kidney Disease Awareness month but the project will continue into April to celebrate Donate Life month. ADPKD (autosomal dominate polycystic kidney disease) affects more than 600,000 Americans and 12.4 million people worldwide. The average wait time for a kidney in Illinois is five to seven years. I hope you’ll join me in raising awareness for kidney disease through this project this month and beyond.
This “ask me about organ donation” design is a sneak preview of more graphics to come in April.
More on organ donation to come next month, but the easiest thing you can do today to help contribute to the solution is register as an organ donor. If you live in Illinois, registering can be done online here.. If you live in another state, organdonor.gov can direct you to your state.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Chelsie Tamms is an award-winning lettering artist and designer based out of Chicago. She is the owner of Lettering Works, a branding studio that connects businesses to their audience through creativity and strategy. With over 10 years of practice of lettering and design, Chelsie is passionate about craft and intention. When she’s not designing, she can be found eating ice cream, traveling internationally, or starting a new passion project.
