“CARE News combines powerful photography with typography that compels you to act.” —juror Dan Mall
“CARE’s presentation of stories just pops off the page in a repeatable design system that works. Beautiful photography draws you in, but thoughtful user experience helps you navigate to the next story and keeps your attention. Definitely one of the best news sites we saw this year.” —juror Phillip Tiongson
Overview: CARE fights global poverty by empowering girls and women around the world, which puts the humanitarian organization in a unique position to highlight these underrepresented voices. Wanting to bring storytelling into its work in a more holistic way and position itself as a media outlet with strong journalistic content that creates a connection with visitors, CARE partnered with full-service digital design agency Teal Media to create CARE News. The powerful content platform leverages rich photography, a highly visual approach, microinteractions and a component-based design system to enable CARE’s team to tell these critical stories.
Teal Media created new user interface components and revised existing ones, established new modules and page layouts, devised a full iconography set, and added new design elements.
The site features a rich variety of content, including videos, photography, slideshows and audio.
The back end enables content managers to build their own pages with a library of preset modules that consist of a variety of layouts and visual treatments.
Comments by Bailey Seitter, CARE, and Jessica Teal, Teal Media:
Describe the purpose of the project and its target audience. “CARE News leverages its local content creators and showcases these vital stories to invite the viewer to get to know the people and places on a personal level that define CARE’s mission, with the sole purpose of getting viewers to take action and share in the work of having a global impact.”
How did time constraints affect your final solution? “CARE News wanted to start small, and the project was on a tight timeline launch of three months, so Teal was going to be designing and building the site at the same time the content was being developed. This was a great fit for a component-based system that enabled the CARE team to quickly create detailed, dynamic stories even before they knew what the exact content on every page would be. Teal built this in a way that acts more like a system than just a single website. Each component is designed so it can be used in other applications both online and offline. Additional components can also be added over time; once added, they’re available to use for any existing or new content that is created, so the entire system keeps getting more flexible.”
How did this process affect the internal processes for CARE? “This was a really fun project to work on, and we’re excited to see the stories that come out of it. Everyone who’s seen the site along the way has exclaimed how beautiful it is, and everyone who’s been in the back-end custom WordPress content management system so far has noted how easy and intuitive it is to work in. CARE has such strong photographers and storytellers working around the world, and we finally have a way to properly show their work.”
