Responses by Stephanie Lanning, executive producer, August Heffner, creative director, Adam Gault, senior strategist and John Brown, executive technical director, Instrument

Background: With brand identity work by Manual, the new site for global innovative health nonprofit PATH is designed to be a publishing platform to tell the stories of the life-changing work that PATH does around the globe, while providing important resources to health professionals worldwide. It’s built from the ground-up to ultimately drive conversation, including partnerships, investments and donations from corporations, individuals, governments and foundations.

Highlights: A backend CMS that allows the PATH global team to publish its work from anywhere in the world. With this in mind, we completely stripped the features to its essentials and structured the entire navigation of the site around democratizing content.

Favorite details: The limited number of page types and components. We took an incredibly complex system of information—spanning 20,000 pages—and reduced that to a handful of page types. But we are most proud of what the site will become in the future when PATH employees use these templates and components to create new experiences and new ways of showing information.

Challenges: Since PATH is a complex organization that is doing amazing work across a wide range of health industries, this depth of work comes from thousands of employees around the globe and a complex number of different users with different needs and goals. It was part of our mission to unpack all of these audiences and unify them under a singular purpose and belief: that better health moves all of humanity forward.

Navigational structure: We kept the global toolset as simple as possible, while still being powerful enough to sort through this massively diverse and dense body of work. Users can start anywhere and filter out, or combine topics as they go. The point is to reduce the consequence of exploration and encourage users to read something that piques their interests. The more they read, the more they understand how meaningful the work really is.

Technical features: We progressively enhanced PATH.org so that it works completely without JavaScript and selectively delivers images and other content, minimizing download size. This means that users using smartphones or high-compression browsers are given experiences that work with their needs, and those visiting on modern devices see a site boosted by JavaScript, high-res images and other experience enhancers.