OVERVIEW
Project Background
The nonprofit organization, Arts Help, is a digital art publisher that pushes for social change in society. They built an online creative community of members who follow the United Nations 17 Sustainable Development Goals as an outline for making the world a better place. Arts Help welcomes all creatives that use their artistic skills to impact a social impact in society.
The Team
Client Arts Help
Design Team Ally Wheeler, Abbey Dandy, Nguyen Pham, Santiago Cubillos, JJ Livesley, and myself
Project Management Cara Clear and Lauren Busche
Development Mason Posch, Holden Christiansen
Defining the Problem
Arts Help needed a website redesign to support the creative community continually. The site needed better navigation to make exploring the different social change categories easier.
The ultimate goal is to elevate Arts Help's content and brand,
by creating a destination, an editorial experience.
Evolved the current brand
Created a design language for the editorial experience
Designed and built an extensive component library
- That upheld the brand and design language we created
- Was flexible and scaleable to empower the publishers to evolve and adapt their platform over time
Process
Our Design Process
We didn’t want to completely redesign the Arts Help brand, but elevate it. In order to do so, we sorted out Arts Help’s strengths and weaknesses to revolutionize the brand.
My Role and Challenges
1. What is the most organized way to update the editorial site with new content?
2. How can we present the United Nations' 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to the user?
Design Challenge 1: Create grid components to promote new publications.
When we started working on the project, we knew that the website would require a lot of effort in terms of its visual appeal. We had to come up with a way to showcase newly published stories throughout the site. Our solution was to create grid components or templates for the new stories. We identified specific pages that would need this treatment during the wireframe stage. These pages include:
Home editorial page
Artist Series pages
Category pages
Each page has its own unique needs that require different editorial components. Once the wireframes were approved, my team and I explored various design treatments to fulfill those requirements.
We designed a system of editorial components that modernize and elevate the current brand. The system is tailored to be customized for different types of content. Elements that can be customized in each component include; tags, author, title, image, or a brief article overview.
Design Challenge 2: Design a captivating interactive experience for users to discover the 17 SDGs.
The most problematic part of this challenge was finding a solution to display the number of goals, followed up with an in-depth summary.
We wanted to design an exciting interaction for the user to filter through the 17 SDGs. Here is how we accomplished this as a team.
1. Place all goals within one frame.
2. The user is able to browse all 17 SDGs with the scroll function pinned at the bottom of the frame. With the scroll in place, the user can efficiently jump between the different goals.
3. After the user selects a 'number' they will be prompted to submerge themselves into a 'Deep dive' or a fun summary of each goal.
