We had three months to turn this around and less than $10,000 to spend. The UN News site is complex and offered in 9 languages with a range of multimedia content. There is a unified editorial team but multiple stakeholders beyond the immediate team. The ambition was to take the look and feel of a legacy site and move it to the cutting edge of digital design for news sites. We were keen to work with a leader in news design and had the great fortune to set up a collaboration with Mario Garcia who has recrafted websites for many media outlets, some of them beyond the English-speaking world. He was familiar with many of our challenges but our unique deeply multilingual news website gave him a new set of issues to take on. We were also clear that in redesign, there were broad branding issues for UN websites and accessibility concerns which had to be respected, for the most part. We began with wireframe design and then sifted through a multitude of design options to see what conformed to our content categories and workflows across languages. We then played with fonts and moving pieces of content around settling on a content hierarchy that made sense. We then came up with two final subsets of design possibilities and presented this to our senior team for final oversight and narrowing down. Once the design of choice was clear, we finalized details of graphics and typeface and layout and presented it to our senior team who scrutinized it for branding and accessibility before final sign-off. All of this was accomplished within a tight time-frame and the project came in within budget.
The results took a very plain assortment of food on the menu to a smorgasbord of offerings showcasing the visual richness of the content and organizing it in the best principles of information architecture and content hierarchy. The major accomplishment was improved navigation across content categories, brand consistency with news design best practices, the use of serif and sans-serif typeface, accessibility concerns and compliance with branding guidelines across 9 languages and bidirectional, non-Latinate scripts.
