Challenge

Bold Nebraska played a huge role in the #NOKXL fight. (Read more about the role design played here.) It was a historic win for grassroots activism on many levels. The formation of a new alliance of unlikely groups was the next phase for this movement of rural states and communities involved in the climate change struggle.  

Evolve the Bold Nebraska brand to elevate the Bold Alliance idea and allow for multiple state-based organizations to exist underneath. Create a family of websites to connect states together and provide visitor’s with the info needed to take action. The websites should work together and individually to move people to action.

Solution

We kept the core concept of the original Bold brand intact. The “Bold Block” remains the cornerstone visual. We matured the Bold Alliance color palette and introduced state-centric colors and logotypes. The final set of deliverables we executed for each brand included a complete logo package for print and web, stationary, social media graphics, and basic brand and social media guides. Then it was onto the website.

Website Alliance

Designing and developing a new website for each state organization was the biggest challenge of the project. From our initial vision document:

We want each website to offer a structured flexibility in terms of uniting the Alliance together while still allowing each state’s issues to lead the way. We see this as an activist-centered theme that lays out the Alliance vision and informs visitors to the site with appropriate news and actions.

In 2013, the Bold Nebraska website was redesigned and developed to the standards of the modern Web. It was made fully responsive and migrated over to Wordpress for its CMS. The site became an important hub for progressive news and actions in the state and was the backstop for numerous campaign efforts from the #NOKXL fight to GOTV efforts.

Since then, as new alliances were forged outside of Nebraska, we learned a lot from the day-to-day use of the website. When we started the redesign this year, we kept in tact core aspects of the design—an image-centric UI, prominent calls-to-action, an emphasis on sharing, unique treatments for featured content, and distraction-free detail pages. But we also refined where needed and fixed things that didn’t really work that well.

The end result was a workhorse of a political activist theme for each state partner. The core navigation was determined to be the ever-changing content sections of the site—News, Actions, Events. Key Issues each got their own page with standard About info secondary to the core experience.

Yes, it’s light and responsive. And yes, we kept it on Wordpress. With Advanced Custom Fields, we were able to make virtually every part of the website editable in the CMS. On each landing page, featured content was treated a little differently and placed at the top. The biggest improvement was on the optimization of the homepage. Every feature was developed to be optional aside from a basic stream of content and the about section. Important campaigns or pieces of news were able to be highlighted in multiple ways in varying degrees of emphasis. 

Finally, with an image required for each post type, we streamlined the sizing to make it easy on workflow. The Bold staff is not huge by any means. In the day-to-day, lots can be happening at any given moment. We implemented a standard size (1200 x 630) for the featured image in all cases. The old site had multiple sizes that displayed in a variety of locations. Now they were developed to be consistent across the board. A big time saver when a Bold team member would need to add a similar post to all state sites. With an image size based on social media standards, we also knew it would look good when shared to Facebook and Twitter. 

Over the years, Bold has proven to be an extremely effective progressive group dedicated to clean energy and a bright future. With the new brand and website presence now launched into the world, we’re excited to see what lies ahead.