IN A WORLD OF FOR-PROFIT ORGANIZATIONS, I BELIEVE THAT DOING WORK YOU FEEL GOOD ABOUT IS A GIFT
With a BSc in Design from SFU, and experience developing a charity fundraising software platform from the ground up, I have a passion for meaningful, purpose-driven projects which benefit society
LATEST WORK
MOMENTUM
Custom Icon Progress Bar
Individual peer-2-peer fundraising pages can feel quite cookie-cutter and lacking in personality and excitement. I thinking bringing in the character of the individual campaign can go a long way to making their online presence more pleasant and engaging, so I designed a series of icons that can be used to customize the progress bar based on the type of the campaign our client is running.
The Process
Once I had a list of campaign types, I came up with the kind of icon I wanted to represent each type. I included a heart for campaigns which didn’t have a distinct theme but which still wanted to use the icon progress bar. With a rough idea of what I wanted the icon to look like, the trick was continuously simplifying it down to its most essential form. It had to fit easily on a small progress bar, be instantly recognizable, and not compete visually with the surrounding components.
MOMENTUM
Food Drive Campaign Meter
The main page of a campaign is where you have a lot more real estate to work with and also where you want to capture people’s interest. With this in mind, I’ve been designing more visually engaging progress meters which also act as a visual metaphor for the more abstract campaign goals. What I affectionately call “the fruit meter” is designed to illustrate what exactly the donors’ money and fundraisers’ hard work is going towards; more money raised translates into more food supplied to people in need.
The Process
I wasn’t sure what visual metaphor to use for this meter at first. I considered a food delivery truck traveling along a road, or a grocery bag or apple filling in, but ultimately went with groceries on a scale because I wanted it to both represent the material benefit of donations raised, but also the hardship the beneficiaries of food banks feel at the till when they try to pay for their groceries. I wanted it feel like that feeling was easing as it filled. The fun animation adds to the weight of that feeling by giving the food a tangible sense of heft.
MOMENTUM
Animal Charity Campaign Meter
Inspired by animal charity Kennel Lock-In events, animal charities have been adopting fundraisers where they leverage their greatest resource, the appeal of the animals in their care, to inspire their donors. Meant for the main page of a campaign, this progress meter illustrates how the resources gifted to the charity translates into animals making their way to their forever homes.
The Process
I wasn’t sure what visual metaphor to use for this meter at first. I considered a food delivery truck traveling along a road, or a grocery bag or apple filling in, but ultimately went with groceries on a scale because I wanted it to both represent the material benefit of donations raised, but also the hardship the beneficiaries of food banks feel at the till when they try to pay for their groceries. I wanted it feel like that feeling was easing as it filled. The fun animation adds to the weight of that feeling by giving the food a tangible sense of heft.
MOMENTUM
Athletic Campaign Activity Tracker
When it came time to update the Activity Tracker for campaigns which ask fundraisers to raise pledges by working out every day for a month, I wanted to give it a makeover that didn’t just look better, but better communicated the idea behind the campaign. The winding path of this progress tracker charts the progression of each daily workout with a top down skeuomorphic view of markers for each activity.
The Process
The idea for this winding path started as an exploration of different structures for timelines. I found some examples that reminded me of the abstract form transit maps can take to communicate relative distances. This felt like a great metaphor for both the physical distance traveled by fundraisers who often filled their timeline with running or cycling, but also the figurative distance they needed to go to get from the beginning of their one month of workouts to their goal.
MOMENTUM
Donor Leaderboard
Leader boards are one of the linchpin components of any fundraising campaign site. When updating the design I wanted to make sure that it had a mostly neutral palette and used color in a way that could accommodate a broad array of possible campaign colors and still look good. That versatility also had to extend to the structure and spacing in a way that would allow me to create a stripped down version which looks good in the narrow side column of an individual fundraising page, as well as a larger more detailed version that looks good on the main page of a fundraising site. Both versions had to feel as though they were the same component and that they matched the other components used by the client.
The Process
The goals for designing this component was to give it a more dynamic shape based on a winner’s podium, as well as creating a more neutral palette for the campaign colors to layer over easily. Once I had the basic shape and a sense of how I wanted the colors to contrast, it was just a process of refining the palette and layout until it fit seamlessly with the other components on the page. The large version on the main campaign page also needed to describe the type of fundraisers. I didn’t want this to just float unmoored above it, so I designed a banner that incorporated the title directly into the leaderboard so that it still feels like one complete component.
MOMENTUM
Product Website
When it came time to update the product site for Momentum, we wanted something clean, simple, and structured that clearly communicated the ways in which our software made our clients’ jobs easier. The monochrome palette stitches everything together visually, with contrasting dark and light color schemes clearly delineating each section. The light sections are slightly off white, letting the featured components really pop off the page.
The software prototypes in the banner, the video of live campaigns made with our software, the interactive embedded software components, the client testimonials, and the graph illustrating how clients revenue has increased after adopting the software, all build a compelling argument for why to make the switch to our platform.
The Process
When it came time to update the product site for Momentum, we wanted something clean, simple, and structured that clearly communicated the ways in which our software made our clients’ jobs easier. The monochrome palette stitches everything together visually, with contrasting dark and light color schemes clearly delineating each section. The light sections are slightly off white, letting the featured components really pop off the page.
The software prototypes in the banner, the video of live campaigns made with our software, the interactive embedded software components, the client testimonials, and the graph illustrating how clients revenue has increased after adopting the software, all build a compelling argument for why to make the switch to our platform.
Although I knew what the supporting sections of the site would be from the beginning (testimonials/metrics, FAQ, and demo request form), the software features section underwent a number of revisions before we settled on what and how we wanted to highlight about the software.
Its evolution started out as a list of features, experimented with animations illustrating how easy it is to build fundraising pages, became two video series showing how different types of campaigns could be built and what they could look like, then moved to just the video featuring different types of real client campaigns paired with a selection of available interactive components embedded right on the page. The final version also brought the list of software features back into this section, but in a much more concise way.
BC SPCA
For the Paws Summit Site
Because the summit is virtual it needed a method for switching between time zones when registrants are viewing the schedule. The clock at the top of the schedule section let’s them change their time zone, shows them what time it is there currently so they have visual confirmation they’ve selected the right zone, and updates the schedule based on their selection. The schedule also needed to visually communicate that there are multiple speakers giving their presentation concurrently in different virtual “rooms” in the same time slot, so I grouped them and made it so only one talk can open at a time for that room to keep registrants from getting confused.
I also designed a ticket pricing section that switches at a predetermined date between “early bird” and standard pricing and visually represents how much you’re saving by buying larger groups of tickets.
The Process
One of the main issues with the original conference site was the potential confusion about what time sessions were scheduled. The original site tried to solve this by giving instructions to calculate the difference between time zones and including a link to a site that where you could check the local event time zone against your own. The updated version of the site needed a solution that was simpler, more intuitive, and integrated into how the scheduling worked. The simplest solution functionally would have been to just list all the major time zones for each scheduled time slot. The solution we went with allows the registrant to select from a few major time zones, which updates the schedule accordingly.
While this works fine, an area for refinement for future updates to the site could also include the option to search by city name to select your time zone.
The original schedule (seen here in the bottom left) was set up in a way that only allowed enough room to include the session title, which the registrant could then use to look up what the session was about from a long list.
The updated schedule needed to organize and coherently display information based on conference day, session time slot, concurrent or single event room, and feature all of the most pertinent info about that talk easily. I did this by grouping the time slots together into one visual unit using shape and spacing and making the session info available from a drop down that only opens for one room in the time slot at at a time – visually communicating that only one of those sessions can be attended at a time.
