Kindred

A self-initiated concept exploring brand and digital platform design for a community nonprofit.

Kindred had served its neighbourhood for twenty-two years and had the outcomes to prove it — but its website read like an internal memo. Programme pages were written in funder language, the donation path took seven clicks, and the identity had drifted into four unofficial logo variants across print and social.

The organisation's leadership framed this as a redesign. My research reframed it as a credibility problem: the digital presence was actively underselling the work, and the people most likely to volunteer were the least able to understand what was on offer.

I facilitated three stakeholder workshops with staff, board, and long-term volunteers, then ran twelve interviews split across current volunteers, lapsed donors, and neighbours who had never engaged. Analytics and heatmap review gave me the behavioural half of the picture; the interviews gave me the why.

The clearest signal came from people who had almost engaged and stopped. Nobody doubted the mission. They doubted whether the organisation was still active — an impression created entirely by an outdated interface and undated content.

I rebuilt the information architecture around two intents — I want to help and I need help — and made everything else subordinate. That decision alone cut the top-level navigation from nine items to four and gave every page a single obvious next action.

The identity work ran in parallel. Sketch rounds explored a sunrise mark drawn from the organisation's own founding language, refined across three iterations from literal to geometric. I paired it with a warm neutral palette and a single confident accent so that photography of real people could carry the emotional weight instead of decoration.

Every page template was drafted as a content-first wireframe with real copy before any visual design, so that layout decisions served the message rather than the other way around.

The platform was built in Webflow so the two-person communications team could maintain it without a developer, with a CMS structured around programmes, stories, and events. I built the component library, set up the CMS collections, and wrote a twenty-page editorial guide covering voice, image selection, and accessibility.

Accessibility was a build requirement, not a review step: contrast ratios were locked at token level, every interactive element received a visible focus state, and the whole site was keyboard-tested before launch.

The new Kindred leads with people and proof. The homepage answers three questions above the fold — what we do, who it is for, and how to join — and every programme page states its time commitment before its mission statement.

The identity carries across print, signage, and social with a documented system the team can extend. The measure of success I set for it is independence: a communications lead publishing weekly without design support.

This project taught me that a rebrand is a change management project wearing a visual costume. The design work was straightforward; the work that mattered was getting a board with twenty-two years of attachment to agree on what to let go of.

I would build measurement in earlier — we set up analytics after the IA was locked, which cost us a clean baseline. The next opportunity is a lightweight impact dashboard so the recency signals that drive trust update themselves rather than depending on staff time.