A Human-Centered Design Group Reborn

After a wildly successful run, including performing the first digital audit finding $11 million in profit for the General Services Administration (GSA) and winning a Service to the Citizen Award, this group of federal employees found themselves subject to mass layoffs and firings. Eager to continue the work, they are carrying on their mission to bring Human-centered Design (HCD) training and mission-oriented focus to people and organizations in both the public and private sectors. Over two months, we have been building a new brand for this work, archiving and compiling public domain materials, and giving them a new home.

The bulk of the work was building a new platform for the Human-centered Design Guide series, an eight-part book with hundreds of pages of material. These guides provide detailed yet approachable steps for every phase of the design process, from discovery to measuring success. We built a platform in Astro, then designed and developed an interface that navigated all eight books efficiently and clearly. One of the most difficult challenges with an extensive web content collection is providing clarity about where you are. With a physical book, it’s easy to see how many pages of content you’ve read through and mark sections as you go. We created a navigation with sections that persist to make a clear map of where you are in the context of what you are actively reading.

To add value to the work and create an artifact people can hold and take notes on, we also developed a series of PDF variants of the guides. These two forms meet people where they are in their projects. Eight and a half years of research, development, planning, testing, and execution has gone into this material, so ensuring the guides have a quality place to exist has been the primary focus of our work with Ishmael Interactive.

With mission-critical content mostly sorted, branding work came second. The goal was to create something that expressed optimism and creativity while still being competent and well-structured. The logo mark can carry expressiveness, while a rigid grid can have structure, and color can carry optimism. With the logo, grid, and color working hand-in-hand, the cohesive brand experience is welcoming, inviting, competent, and clear.

• Our new branding and website literally makes me weep for joy. At Ishmael Interactive, we had traditional branding needs paired with a massive amount of text to wrangle, and Typetura organized it all into this fun, sleek, cohesive website that’s inviting and easy to navigate.

  Ana Monroe, Founder

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