Brief
The United Nations asked my team to design and develop a microsite for its Keeping the Promise campaign. The campaign goal was to elevate the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, adopted in 2015 to set the world on a more equal and sustainable path. My team partnered with the UN to develop a clear strategy for campaign engagement through the microsite.
After the client instructed us that we wouldn’t have any data for an interactive map, we had to pivot to a new idea to pitch them. Our runway time was only one month, so I had about a week dedicated to designing, and at this point we still needed them to sign off on a concept. We sent over a few written concepts, which they rejected. Then, I made some sketches to go along with some new written concepts, and we landed on the design below.
Challenges
My 3 biggest design challenges were:
- Working with the icons and assets we were given from their designer. We had about 20 different brand colors, each of these colors were super-saturated and didn’t necessarily vibe together.
- Trying to design something that a developer would be able to implement easily and quickly.
- Giving an abstract ‘essence’ of data, so to speak, without having any real data. This is where we looped in someone from our video team to help us emulate a globe lighting up with colors, appearing like it might be happening in real time in correlation with each promise. The video team also helped us create an intro animation for the landing page.
Results
Each of these challenges kicked my design process into emergency problem-solving gear, which gave me the idea of having the navigation be front and center. This would allow the user to focus on just one Promise at a time, limiting the color palette, and give a little more heft to the project in place of data. Additionally, this allowed the dev team to simply copy and paste code for each of the 12 Promises, instead of having to customize each one for functionality, and thusly streamline development time.
Throughout the first week of launch, participants shared their promise pledges on the site and fulfilled the UN’s campaign goal of “bringing people closer together.”
Final Design
