Revamping a nonprofit’s web presence to better highlight their justice-driven work

Summary

The challenge

JIL, a nonprofit that builds data-informed, people-centered solutions for a more fair and effective justice system, needed to revamp their website and overall brand presence — all in just six weeks. In particular, they needed help conceptualizing and designing a new “knowledge hub,” which they envisioned as an accessible repository for all their reports, blog posts, and multimedia.

While much of their existing brand had a firm foundation, JIL needed help modernizing and expanding their visual language. This was made more challenging by staff constraints. Because the JIL team didn’t have a designer on staff, new visual and brand guidelines needed to be easy for non-designers to follow. Furthermore, JIL’s existing data visualization system had a number of accessibility problems. For instance, many of the colors weren’t accessible when used together (e.g., they didn’t fully align with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) and their main color pairing (red and blue) could come across as too political. They needed new color palettes that aligned with their updated brand and guidance on how to use color effectively when sharing longer-form, data-heavy reports on their new knowledge hub.

With limited staff and a tight timeline, JIL sought an outside partner to refresh their website, transform their brand, and help them develop new data visualizations that better showcased their impact and work.

The solution

Given the tight six-week turnaround, the Skylight team used an agile approach to product development, organizing deliverables into discrete two-week sprints. At the end of each sprint, Skylight delivered key artifacts to JIL, discussed feedback during regular product demonstrations, and iterated accordingly.

Over the course of the project, the Skylight team:

• Streamlined JIL’s site architecture
• Made visual improvements to every page of JIL’s website
• Updated JIL’s brand guidelines to incorporate best practices in color theory and accessibility
• Provided recommendations for improved data visualizations
• Designed the knowledge hub as a dynamic webpage that was visually consistent, searchable, tagged by media type, and sortable by date
• Created modular, re-usable templates for the knowledge hub that JIL’s development team could easily pull from
• Drafted instructions and guidelines that non-designers could seamlessly follow when applying the updated JIL brand across multiple digital and print touchpoints

This work resulted in a refreshed web and brand presence that invited users to view JIL’s new knowledge hub and become involved in their mission as soon as possible. Within this knowledge hub, JIL was now able to share video posts, longer-form reports, and text-based non-profit updates. Furthermore, JIL’s overhauled homepage became a cornerstone example of the expression of the new brand, highlighting the updated color scheme, pattern motif, and stylized data illustrations. JIL’s updated branding now had a color palette that better reflected their impact-driven work, met accessibility requirements, followed a typographic scale, and offered instructions for generating high quality photography and digital components.

To ensure site maintainability over the long term, Skylight packaged up all files and guides, making sure JIL’s key team members had access to, and understood how to leverage, the new design components. Following the final handoff, JIL fully launched this work across their website, knowledge hub, and brand touchpoints.

The results

• Overhauled JIL’s website structure and visuals to improve user experience and engagement
• Designed the new knowledge hub to be easily navigable, with flexible templates for streamlined future adjustments
• Refined brand guidelines to incorporate thoughtful use of color, typography, and accessible design elements
• Developed user-friendly instructions, enabling JIL team members to consistently apply new brand standards across the redesigned website, ensuring a unified look
• Provided a complete package of resources and instructional materials, empowering the JIL team to independently manage and sustain the refreshed digital presence