NORD Rare Action Network Web Design
One in ten Americans are affected by a rare disease (a disease affecting less than 200,000 people worldwide). A lot of these folks never have the opportunity to meet other people with similar conditions. NORD - the National Organization for Rare Disorders, wanted create a way for people with rare diseases to get in touch with each other.
NORD came to TRU looking for a solution to an extremely ambitious plan. They wanted a single web site to serve as a message board, policy and advocacy resource, and social network for people with rare diseases and those who cared about them. We created a plan for them to bring their plan for a "Rare Action Network" to life. The focus was a clean WordPress website, with the ability to implement features when NORD could support them.
I worked on this project while at TRU Events, and this project wouldn't have been possible without the other members of the creative and account teams at the time.
Brand Development
The ask for a logo was very wide open. It had to include elements that tied it back to the NORD logo, and it had to convey .
There was a point in this project where I actually hit the artboard limit in Illustrator for the amount of variations (at the time, it was 100). Eventually, we went from a hundred designs down to fifty, down to ten (you know how it goes) and then down to the one pictured here. We settled on the megaphone as an iconic representation of "action" and "advocacy," with the NORD "genes" acting as the call-out.
I took lead and developed a few different applications for the logo, as well as some branded graphic elements that could be used to tie together communications.
Web Design
Since this was a large project, we plotted out an information architecture. This gave us a firm grasp on where everything was supposed to go, what buttons connected to what page, etc. Then we worked with our web development partners over at Bicycle Theory to bring the design to life in WordPress. We even hosted a training seminar to bring NORD's internal team up-to-speed on the backend of the WordPress.
After the site was working, we spent a solid week developing a "lifestyle guide" for RAN. We laid out examples of voice, tone, and imagery. Then, we made a push to fill out the site and make sure that there were no "wall of text" pages using photographs and stock imagery that fit the guidelines. I even developed two slider animations, one on the home page, and the other on the About page.
The site has changed a bit since we handed off the original web design (Visual Composer is a hell of a program), but the foundation we built still stands strong and hopefully will encourage people to get involved with this awesome initiative!