Communally Rebrand
We received the initial branding guidelines from an external agency, which included a new logo, colors, fonts, and information about moods for things like imagery.
Communally.tech
One of the things to consider during the rebrand, was creating a new corporate / marketing website. When this project first started, I spent a good deal of time doing competitive research and also researching CMS technology. In collaboration with other stakeholders, the content sections were broken down into:
- contact information
- product information
- news
- organizational culture
- unique benefits for workers
- B Corp status
- expertise of both policy research and technology
CMS Comparison
Next I focused on the CMS aspect of the site and got some quick prototypes going even before visual designs were done. I did a comparison of some available CMS:
Grav
I presented the options and got the go-ahead to use Grav CMS. I then worked on optimizing the workflow that would involve a marketing team updating and publishing content to the site.
I consulted with IT to get the whole site in version control and also to set up a deploy process, so that a Marketing person could add a news item and specify a date that it would automatically get published. One important solution for the workflow included installing a plug-in into MS Word (Writage) that would allow normal text to be copied into Markdown. This meant that even if the content writer did not know Markdown, she could use her preferred word processor and then simply copy and paste the text into the Admin Panel of the Communally site.
Blog Feature
There were three distinct types of news items, including “News”, “OpEds”, and “Pressroom”. I discovered that each had separate specifications. For example, a Pressroom news item would link out to an external article, and thus I made it possible to directly link out to the article from the initial teaser text. For regular news items, these tended to be time-sensitive announcements like the launching of a new product, so I created a section on the homepage to showcase the latest news items.
Interaction Design
Some of the interaction design did end up differing slightly from the initial visual design. For example, I made a change to the navigation whereby one could scroll down the page and still see the primary navigation for the site. I.E., the navigation bar itself becomes semi-transparent as you scroll down.
Updated Interaction:
UI Design
I contributed to the UI design in various parts of the site after the initial vision was created by the visual designer. I designed a few of the special sections on the site and later added in new pages that were slight variations of existing page templates. One special section was a data visualization of some data, that I worked on responsive UI changes for.
Communally Sales Materials
I worked closely with the CEO and sales team to create sales materials after the new brand guide was created. Much of the presentation materials were overhauled because in fact, most people knew that the diagrams "with those lightening bolts" wouldn't fly any longer.
I even contributed to an interactive-based presentation in Prezi, which involved much back-and-forth on how the assets could be viewed in a non-linear way.
