Research for Action (RFA) is passionate about high-quality education and advancing racial and social justice. They came to us because their website wasn’t serving them: Users couldn’t quickly locate the content they needed, or understand the full breadth of RFA’s expertise as a national program and policy organization.
We set out together to create an engaging, boundary-pushing website that would communicate RFA’s expertise in a clear, beautiful, and grounded way, to an audience ranging from educators to policymakers.
We not only wanted to polish the site from a design perspective, we also wanted to support and strengthen Research for Action’s position as a leading voice on educational equity. We approached this with RFA by collaborating to: sharpen their messaging, elevate their experts, and refresh their narrative.
First, we worked together to align RFA’s brand messaging with their identity and expertise. Then, we built out RFA’s team profiles and tagging taxonomy to ensure their in-house experts were positioned as such, and finally, we developed nuanced content relationships, so that as users work through the website, they would be presented with an interesting and full story of RFA’s impact. We prioritized:
Streamlining and translating the ‘who’, ‘what’, and ‘why’
Providing content for ‘skimmers’, ‘swimmers’, and ‘divers’ within a scalable structure
Moving beyond awareness-raising to perception-shifting
When it came to the look and feel of the website, we wanted to communicate that RFA brings a rigor to their work and is driven by research – and we wanted to do it in a way that felt community-focused as well.
For the website’s visual and design approach, we leaned into warm, subtle, and organic colors, layering in tonal background patterns and cool gradients. For the typography, we selected a softer and more traditional serif for big statements, complemented by a cleaner and more utilitarian serif and sans combination for body copy and details.
When it came to bringing RFA’s expertise to life, we needed to balance ideas of creative expression and professional restraint, while generating the feel of an inviting, authentic, and hands-on organization.
To accomplish this, we designed custom illustrations, and applied them throughout the website to bring warmth, and a personal touch to the descriptions of RFA’s expertise, projects, and approach.
As a research-focused organization, RFA has an incredible amount of information to share with a variety of audiences: policymakers, practitioners, philanthropists, and the public at local, state, and national levels.
To make sure that each of their audiences would be able to find exactly what they need, we performed an audit to build a picture of RFA’s content universe. Then, we collaborated to develop a ‘mega menu’ and highly filterable resource library – allowing users to navigate multiple levels of content to find exactly what they are looking for, right when they need it.
Radish Lab’s research-led approach to refreshing our visual identity made all the difference and meant that this process could impact much more than our brand visuals. It has truly been transformative.
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Radish Lab has been a trusted partner in helping us reimagine a new digital home and approach for engaging our partners and audiences in the story of the Foundation’s work and impact.
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Our monthly search meetings with Radish allow us to take a step back, think big picture and move beyond what’s up, what’s down to focus on true goals and objectives.
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What was really impressive was their willingness to stand behind their creative vision, which is really what we were paying them for. They did more than offer technical expertise or put up a website; they gave us guidance on how to best demonstrate our strengths to the world.
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Their exceptional communicative style made this project run more smoothly than I've experienced with other vendors; they were open, honest, and clear, which are incredibly beneficial to the successful execution of a project.
Radish Lab takes an amazing, holistic approach to client work. They were extremely adept at helping us develop our vision for the site, keeping to our established schedule, and finding creative solutions for any obstacles that arose. They are highly talented, motivated, and exceptionally personable.
