How can we make politics approachable for all Pennsylvanians?
Philadelphia’s importance in the history of America is easy to forget with the bustling metropolis of New York to the northeast and Washington, D.C. being the current capital of the country. But with Pennsylvania being a swing state, and Philly being the largest concentration of voters in this battleground state, the importance of nonpartisan civic organizations like Committee of Seventy, which “advances representative, ethical and effective government in Philadelphia and Pennsylvania through citizen engagement and public policy advocacy” cannot be understated.
During my time at P’unk Ave, I had the opportunity to work on the redesign of Seventy’s website, which was long overdue. Their old site buried the important work they were doing like “slaying the gerrymander” and a wealth of resources for voters behind strange layouts and hard to navigate menus. Our task on the P’unk Ave team was to help Seventy become more accessible so they could be the most approachable and useful political education resource for Pennsylvania.
Seventy didn’t have much of a brand when we started working with them, and didn’t have the budget for a full-fledge brand suite, so we took cues from their most recent annual report, which used friendly icons and illustrations without feeling goofy, and used a patriotic color palette one might expect from a political site. Seventy wanted to be seen as trustworthy and nonpartisan, so while we used blue for backgrounds we made sure to use red for callouts and accents, and introduced a purple when we felt we were leaning too much on one or the other.
One challenge of the redesign was housing all the helpful information Seventy provided without overwhelming anyone. A lot of the site uses card treatments so quick snippets of information can be shown and users can easily scan different topics to decide what they want to learn more about. We provided a few different card treatments for that the Seventy team was able to flex across multiple use cases. We also made use of sections with drawers to offer more information if someone wanted it, but kept a quick overview of topics visible at all times.