Investing in Native Communities
Interactive web portal providing education and resources to encourage philanthropic funding of Native American issues.
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My role
Design Lead: Information Architecture, Wireframing, Prototyping, Branding, UI Design, Front-end development -
Team
Candid Web Services, Candid Knowledge Services, Native Americans in Philanthropy -
Timeline
January - September 2019 -
Tools
Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Photoshop, Invision, JIRA, Wordpress
Project Overview
Working closely with Native Americans in Philanthropy, my team at Candid (then known as Foundation Center) developed an ambitious web portal to encourage greater philanthropic funding and support to Native communities in the U.S. One of the key features was an interactive timeline of historically traumatic events, the first of its kind from a Native perspective.
I served as design lead on this project, from working on the information architecture and user flows, to branding, wireframing, visual design, and front-end development of the portal.
What I Learned
I worked directly with our client through out this project, and learned a lot about how to communicate and negotiate on design ideas while making sure I understood and represented their perspective and experience. I aso learned an immense amount about Native culture while working on this project. I was extremely grateful to attend the Native Americans in Philanthropy 30th Annivery Summit for the official launch of the website, and was humbled to see the positive reactions to the portal and excitement over the national impact it would have for this cause.
Moodboard
This design was sensitive in nature, as there are many offensive stereotypical depictions of Native Americans prevalent in our culture. Instead of icons and illustrations, I focused on featuring photographs of authentic artifacts from Indigenous culture, as well as real images from the client, as background treatments through out the site.
Sitemap
We figured out how best to organize the site content in order to accomplish the goal of giving users a comprehensive background of Native history, the issues facing Native communities today, and the ways they could get involved.
Wireframes
Before starting design, I created wireframes of each page to communicate and decide with our back-end developer, the Candid internal team, and the client the content and functionality that we would need for the website. This also helped the team prioritize which features were most important for launch, and which would wait until future versions.
Mockups and Prototype
After wireframes were finalized, I applied the styles from the mood board to create each page design on desktop view. I combined the designs into an interactive prototype using Invision, making it easy for the team to share and discuss the various pages with other stakeholders, and hammer out any details or changes before development began.
Front-end Development
The site was built on our customized wordpress platform, which had been developed by myself and our team and hosted a myriad of other wordpress sites. We leveraged the parent theme functionality, and also created wordpress custom post types and templates using PHP to support the new features. I styled the site using HTML, SCSS, and Javascript. I also made sure to make every feature and page responsive, to be accessible on every device.
Conclusion
The Investing in Native Americans website was a massive project that I was truly honored to work on. From design ideation, client communication, graphic design, to coding, this truly was an all-encompassing project for an important cause. I enjoyed learning about Native culture issues and working with my fellow team members to bring this goal to life in the form of this interactive web portal. I hope to work on similar projects in the future.
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