National Voice
The run up to the November 2004 election was a busy time for us. National Voice contacted us that September and asked us to redesign three websites by Election Day on November 2nd which was just a month away. Our first step was redesigning the main National Voice site so that it offered users better access to in-depth statewide voting resources. Then, working with National Voice's marketing partner Weiden+Kennedy12, we created a companion HTML site for the November 2 campaign that integrated with a Flash backend database. Finally, for Vote All of Your Values we created site templates that encouraged a values-based approach to GOTV (Get out the Vote). These sites registered and organized thousands of voters in 2004.
Quick Responses to a Fluid Design Challenge
Some clients know exactly what they want when they come to us. Some clients,
like National Voice, have no idea what’s coming around the next corner.
Fortunately, we’re comfortable in both environments. One of the fun things
about the National Voice / November 2 campaign was that in the four weeks
we worked on the project, we never knew what was going to happen next. One
minute, Yahoo created IM avatars for November 2 and they needed to go up
on the site right away, another minute Stevie Wonder threw his name behind
the campaign and we rushed to get a mini-site integrated into our design.
A third organization, Vote All of Your Values joined the fray and we quickly
created flexible templatse they could use to organize voters across the
country.
What did we learn from those fast-paced four weeks? From a design perspective, rolling with a fluid situation requires establishing a set of design parameters that are flexible and can adapt to a variety of uses. This lesson helped us greatly after the 2004 election when National Voice morphed into the Center for Civic Participation and came back to us to design their new web presence and graphic identity.