The Diabetes Link
An updated brand identity, website, and supporting materials for a national non-profit organization that supports students with diabetes.
My Role:
Lead Designer responsible for brand development,
UI / UX.
Company:
Chalkbox Creative
Key Responsibilities:
-
Brand identity development
-
Audience research
-
User journey and wireframe development
-
Prototype creation and testing
-
Stakeholder presentations and collaboration facilitation
-
Asset delivery and launch
The challenge
The Diabetes Link, previously called The College Diabetes Network, recently completed brand strategy work when they approached my team at Chalkbox Creative. Based on the insights gained in the strategy process, they needed to reimagine their brand and their online presence to best serve their evolving audience of students with diabetes, and the caregivers that support them.
The new brand identity needed to feel appropriate to the younger student demographic, while also not alienating their parents and caregivers. The website needed to comfortably host a wide repository of knowledge while remaining easy to navigate, help students form new chapters, and make finding resources for caregivers easy.
Sketch, sketch, sketch!
After meeting with The Diabetes Link's board, and reviewing their brand strategy documentation, we began sketching for the brand identity portion of the project. We sketched exhaustively, and then reviewed all concepts with the board. We worked collaboratively to narrow to one conceptual direction to iterate on from there.
Before and after.
With a transparent, iterative process, we refined the brand mark to something simple and iconic. The resulting mark can be seen as step in the rhythm of ones life; a student or support coming to TDL for community and resources and then bouncing forward to live more prepared, more independently, and more vibrantly.
Visual elements of an emerging new brand.
We worked closely with The Diabetes Links board, as well as some of their student trustees to make sure we landed on a color palette that felt timeless, yet still resonated with a young and active audience.
Connecting in the physical and digital world.
The Diabetes Link is a massive organization, and while their digital presence is key, they also need to function in the physical world. We built a full suite of supporting materials to help them in this endeavor.
Site architecture, wireframes, and the user journey.
The Diabetes Link's website serves two primary functions; to build community and connection between students, and to serve as a resource repository for students and parents. The amount of information and resources this site holds is massive, so we had to be careful to make sure we understood how this information is structured, what was most important, and how to get our audience there with ease.
An intuitive mobile experience for a mobile generation.
Functionality on mobile is a massively important consideration for The Diabetes Link's key audience, high school and college age students. This demographic has been digitally active for most of their lives and they expect online experiences to be intuitive and functional. To this end we built the site with a focus on mobile first, testing with our target demographic to make sure we got it right.
A place to connect,
and a repository of knowledge.
Whether on mobile or on desktop, The Diabetes Link's website allows their audience to connect with each other with greater ease, to build community, and to find the supports they need.
Key take-away and lessons learned.
We maintained a very transparent process throughout this project. This isn't the first project that I've shown EVERY sketch on, and the more I do it the more firmly I believe that allowing that bit of risk and vulnerability yields better collaboration. You may have to firmly defend the ideas you believe are best to move forward with, but that lively conversation introduces new perspectives and gives the client an active hand in shaping the work. They have more ownership, they know right where the ideas came from. This project was no different, and I know we produced better work by including The Diabetes Link's leadership team at every step of the process.
In retrospect, I would love to have had a bit more data, and to have more ongoing data on how the site is performing. We used TDL's trustees, a group of students that embodies their target audience demographics, for testing which was great. But I would have loved to dive a bit deeper just to make sure we had things right. And now, a few years later, I would love to know how TDL's engagement online is performing.