RestoringVision
RestoringVision needed a new brand identity and website to better match the nonprofit’s position and commitment to solving the global vision crisis.
YEAR 2022
ROLE Visual Design, UX/UI, Branding & Identity, Logo Design
ACCOMPLISHMENTS Silver ADDY Award; logo displayed during Nasdaq Closing Bell
The Challenge
RestoringVision’s brand identity remained mostly unchanged since it was founded. My goal was to create a contemporary brand identity to match the pace of the organization and recognize the prestige it holds in the nonprofit vision health sphere.
The original user experience was a tangled web of vision and donation information that left users with no clear direction on what they can do to help solve the global vision crisis. The donation experience was overcomplicated and a lot of valuable information outlining other ways to donate was hard to navigate to. We needed to find a way to guide users to the donation method that was right for them while telling the impactful story of RestoringVision.
Branding
The client wasn’t necessarily attached to their old brand identity; they were open to big changes and totally new directions. They wanted to breathe some new life into the organization and reconnect with their target audience—essentially, increase visibility of the brand by focusing on the “restore” aspect of “RestoringVision”. I felt their old logo may communicate the wrong message, such as the hand-drawn characteristics which came across as overly juvenile and didn’t quite match the typefaces chosen. The color scheme also seemed light and washed out which made it hard to draw attention to calls to action and other pieces of important information.
Logo
I played with circular shapes as a way to explore unity, community, and vision-related representation without keeping the glasses imagery—the organization does more than hand out glasses to people and communicating that with the mark was important. Since growth was a continuing goal for RestoringVision, I wanted to create an icon that would speak to that in a bright, organic way.
The resulting logo is a design that incorporates elements representing the eye, growth, and color interactions. Each of the four colored components represent the four cornerstones of the organization: heritage (clear vision leader), experience (life-changing impact), service (a pathway to clear vision), and benefits (new lens on life), all of which come together to form the brand promise (life restored).
Color Palette
Their old color palette consisted of a lot of cool blues. I freshened their primary color up a bit by making it brighter and more saturated, then created a new tetrad palette based off of that. This harmonic scheme gave way to more flexibility and visibility since there were more color combinations to work with and added more meaning and purpose to the brand identity since each color communicated something different about the organization’s personality and goals.
Typography
I paired two fonts together: Rubik and Karla. They’re sans serif Google fonts that are practical yet friendly which seemed to represent the organization well.
WEbsite
Donating to a nonprofit should be made as easy as possible. Our plan was broken down into three parts: streamline the website architecture, cultivate a relationship with users via storytelling, and develop a more intuitive donation experience.
To make navigation easier for users, we reworked the website architecture to bring important content front-and-center. We condensed and combined pages with tangential information then revised the sitemap and navigation bar. We created purposeful content funnels and added easily scannable page introductions to coax the user further into the website.
The original website was disorganized and each topic was on a separate page. This caused important information to be hidden, such as the programs RestoringVision provides. When reworking the architecture, we made sure to use more effective labels and cut down on the number of pages the site needs. This gave us the chance to add more information that was missing before, such as a place for annual reports and financials.
Our team worked closely with the client to fine-tune the written and visual content on the site. It was crucial that the website tells the story of the organization throughout the years to build trust with donors. We gathered field photography and video footage to disperse throughout and crafted just the right amount of copy to keep users interested and informed. I designed hero sections at the top of each page to introduce the content below and provide enough space for relevant calls to action if applicable.
In order to make the RestoringVision donation process more intuitive, we cut down on the steps needed to donate and make it easier to find suggestions on other donation methods. RestoringVision’s donation experience originally required a lot of personal information upfront which created a long process that left donors feeling overwhelmed. To help facilitate the experience, we broke it down into multiple parts so the user could submit their information at their own pace without getting lost. We also included “Other Ways to Give” below the fold as opposed to keeping it on a separate page. These small changes helped new and existing donors better understand how to donate to RestoringVision.
Considerations
I’m fortunate enough to have been able to work on this rebranding project from start to finish; I was able to fully understand the reasons for each design decision in the rebrand which helped shape the website. This project actually taught me a lot of soft skills such as building trust with clients, adapting to an organization’s needs, and advocating for design choices by providing rationale. This made me a more valuable designer, a better communicator, and a stronger collaborator.
I’m proud of the work I did but it isn’t perfect. If I had the chance to make improvements on this project and if I had unlimited time, funds, and creativity to spend on it (must be nice…), some of the first things I would do is adjust the padding, reduce type size, and sharpen those rounded rectangles a bit on the website. I would collaborate with the development team we outsourced to do this by creating a solid design system. When I created the brand guide, I only thought about what I knew I could do as a visual designer mucking around in Figma. The development team was able to bring a lot of that to life, but I think there could have been more unity in the website visuals if I understood more about the development side of things.