18F site redesign
In summer 2023, 18F decided to redesign our four year old website:
So why now?
The passage of time on its own isn’t a good reason to do a redesign. Changes in user or organizational needs should drive that choice. In our case, we realized the site no longer reflected our goals. Additionally, some of our designers had windows of time to work on parts of the site between client projects.
We also realized that we could use a small redesign to jumpstart an ongoing process of refinement, which we could pursue without disrupting other priority work.
A website refresh in 3 months
I worked with our design director, content designers, and a design engineer to refresh the website using our 18F brand guidelines, which we did not want to update at the time. This was fine—I love working within a framework to create something new and interesting. And, because we didn’t want to get bogged down creating our own illustration styles at that moment, I adapted an open source illustration set to fit our needs in the short term.
We sprinted the design, getting the basics down and iterating together in development. The new design fit our evolving needs as an organization, leaving us room to grow and adapt in the future.
You can learn more about our process on the 18F blog archive.
When 18F wanted to resurrect our site after GSA deleted it, I also worked on a creating a similar design that would suite our needs as an independent organization.
De-risking Guide
18F updated our De-risking Government Technology Guide in 2024 based on some user research and feedback on the previous iteration of the guide. As part of this process, we needed to redesign the existing website to fit the new guide’s format, and update the print version distributed alongside the web version. (Fun fact: people have actually printed out the booklet to distribute at their agencies!)
The website itself was easy—I’d recently worked the 18F website, so the design was fresh in my mind, so all it took was some time and iteration with stakeholders—but the print booklet provided a challenge, as I hadn’t used InDesign in years. While I had the previous version to work from, I still had to get up to speed with how to use InDesign again, and also how to use Acrobat to make the booklet more accessible to screen readers and keyboard users.
You can learn more about how we iterated on the guide on the 18F blog archive.
Miscellaneous projects
Throughout my time at 18F, I also picked up numerous other internal projects, such as:
- Converting our Google Slides template into Figma Slides
- Converting our icon library and brand color palette from Sketch to Figma
- Updating our illustrations and icons
- Creating a mid-point presentation template
- Designing blog header images
- Writing and updating both our public and internal guides and resources
- …plus more I’m probably forgetting! I’m happy whether I’m working on public-facing work, or helping to support an organization internally.