The Giving Pledge Website and Brand Refresh

Agency: Catalysis

My Role: UI Design | UX Design | Wireframes | Production Design | Prototyping

The Giving Pledge is a simple concept: an open invitation for billionaires, or those who would be if not for their giving, to publicly commit to giving the majority of their wealth to philanthropy either during their lifetimes or in their wills. It is inspired by the example set by millions of people at all income levels who give generously – and often at a great personal sacrifice – to make the world better.

Problem:

The Giving Pledge needed to bring its website into the modern age. The ask was to liven up the brand with more contrast and color, while still holding to a somewhat neutral palette, and most importantly, make the website more user-friendly and accessible.

Deliverables:

• Updated Brand

• User Flow

• Wireframes

• Functional Prototype

• Final Product

Old Design:

The previous design was intended for smaller displays, and also made use of a menu system that was not suited for desktop use. The overall look and feel of the website was dated.

Design Decisions

Based on the needs and creative brief of the client, I decided to focus on the following:

Higher Contrast

When testing the old design, we ran into several accessibility issues regarding the color pallet. This called for an update in the contrast ratios and overall palette colors.

User Flow

The old flow was not easy to navigate. With the entire secondary navigation hidden beneath a hamburger menu, it was hard to tell where on the website you were, or how to navigate to another page.

Wireframes

The Giving Pledge website was simple at its core, but the old design was not so simple to navigate. With these wireframes, we streamlined the navigation and overall layout of the website. This allowed for the message of The Giving Pledge to shine through.

Refreshed Brand

Since we found some accessibility issues regarding the color/contrast ratio on the old design, this allowed us to liven up the brand a bit with a more modern color palette and text styles.

Unfortunately, some of these initial color ideations did not make it into the final design, the client loved them and plans on shifting to this direction in the future.

Build

Included with the designs I sent over functional prototypes to the client so they could see how the new streamlined navigation would work at a user level.

My build also included mobile prototypes so the client would get a chance to experience the site from a mobile standpoint.

Final Design