Design firm: DeSantis Breindel

Design firm DeSantis Breindel gave the redesigned Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s (RWJF) website “a clean, bold and assertive look, with clear focal points around interactive elements that showcase the foundation’s social change mission through its seven program areas,” notes Hope Woodhead, RWJF director of Creative Services.

The site’s three color schemes—orange, purple and blue—randomize per user visit, but feel cohesive due to the carefully structured color palette. Direct pipelines into the foundation’s 10,000-plus item library of information products—signaled through green modules throughout the site—allow the timepressed user to dig right into the foundation’s vast information repository and offer improved paths through searches.

“We refined content display and created engaging, visual, interactive ways to merchandise and cross-promote the foundation’s central themes and missions. The site’s wealth of multimedia and video elements—previously promoted one item at a time—were brought to life through interactive modules that draw the user in from the first glance,” says Jai Sen, director of interactive media. “Each area of the site now feels distinct, but it’s apparent right away what RWJF stands for and is doing to improve the health and health care of Americans.”

Design director Clinton Clarke says, “I used the idea of change as a creative driver and designed the aesthetic of the site to expose the interchangeability of the modules. Slideshows of large, emotive images were used to make an emotional connection to the group’s social change activities, and thin, minimal rules and simplified, bright graphics were used to establish clear hierarchies and make the large amount of content on the site more visually accessible.”

DeSantis Breindel is beginning phase two of the site’s redesign. “We have a great relationship with the foundation,” says Dru DeSantis, partner and creative director. “The wonderful thing about working with them is they’re very smart people who really put a lot of thought and careful attention into everything they do. It’s amazing to do work for a client you can really believe in and take pride in.”

1. Original
With Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s original website design, programs competed for real estate and visibility. Years worth of content aggregation, limited search capabilities and dense information made the website experience unfocused.

2. Redesign
Design firm DeSantis Breindel director of interactive media Jai Sen says, “The architecture of the site was built to deal with large amounts of dynamic content fed from the client’s back-end systems. We needed to create a wholly modular approach, since there would have been no way to anticipate every conceivable page. Once we dug into the information, it became apparent the new site could be driven by four basic layouts—a huge benefit architecturally, as it helps to orient the user within a few clicks, and it simplifies adding new areas to the site consistently.”

DeSantis Breindel
Owners: Dru DeSantis, Howard Breindel
Senior project manager: Bryan Bridges
Director of interactive media: Jai Sen
Design director: Clinton Clarke
Client: Robert Wood Johnson Foundation
Contact: www.desantisbreindel.com