NYCLU
A visual and strategic redesign of the NYCLU's digital home.
Creative Direction & Design Lead
The New York Civil Liberties Union—an affiliate of the national ACLU—is a non-profit organization working to defend and strengthen the civil liberties of New Yorkers across the breadth of New York State.
Known more widely for their judicial work, the NYCLU was looking for a way to showcase the truly intersectional nature of their approach to civil liberties advocacy. In need of a new website independent from that of their parent organization, the NYCLU saw an opportunity to refresh their digital brand and clarify their operational strategy.
Working with a visual identity designed by Open in 2017, I sought to achieve the client’s vision of a powerful and flexible digital resource that would inform, engage, and spur users to action.
I collaborated with internal strategists and key stakeholders at the NYCLU to refine and re-organize their areas of focus. We established a new organizational framework for their focus areas comprised of four color-coded priority pillars and their subsidiary issues areas. All published content was then tagged by relevant issue(s), making the confluence of issue areas visually explicit.
Each issue tag doubles as a link, bringing the user to a page that provides a comprehensive overview of how the NYCLU is tackling that issue based on a multi-pronged approach of campaign work, rights education, thought leadership, policymaking, and court representation.
These five approaches (campaigns, know your rights, ideas, policy, and court cases) were also given their own landing pages—so content could be filtered and processed through the lens of each approach type. By allowing users to seamlessly move between exploring by issue and exploring by approach—the new site helps to reinforce the interconnectedness of the pieces in the NYCLU's portfolio of work.
Starting from any of the landing pages on the site—users can drill down to specific resources and action opportunities that include (but are not limited to): events, know your rights FAQs, data reports, podcasts, and court case filings. Individual resource pages are designed to elevate critical details and pin them to the left rail of the page so that they are always accessible as the user scrolls.
Each landing page ends with a library of all the content that is relevant to that issue area or approach type. I designed a powerful filter & search bar that allows users to easily explore the NYCLU's enormous content library and to quickly edit the returned restults, regardless of what page they are currently on.
