NRDC
Immersive Storytelling

Overview

For NRDC’s 50th anniversary in 2020 we designed and developed an immersive, longform digital storytelling experience illustrating NRDC’s 50 years of environmental impact by taking audiences on a visually compelling, interactive journey through a series of key events.

We designed the site to let audiences explore NRDC’s impact stories in multiple ways, from experiencing the full chronological storyline with a smooth scrolling experience, to using the menu to jump to particular areas of the timeline. Throughout the design we utilized full-screen photography, bold typography, and delightful interactions and animations in scrolling and content loading to build the immersive experience. Our developers implemented the site in Drupal and optimized it for mobile.

My Role

I served as the visual designer for the entire project, taking on responsibilities for the UX after the first iteration, creating animations, guiding copywriting, and overseeing photo selection.

The project began as a simple timeline microsite and it evolved into a fully immersive storytelling experience. After several rounds of revisions and meetings it became clear that a simple timeline wasn’t what the client wanted, and that they were instead interested in something more innovative. We discovered this as we started to look at examples of inspiration sites together and began to introduce more complex micro-interactions. The breakthrough on the project was when we introduced the script, which evoked the emotional experience we wanted users to have when interacting with different sections.

The biggest challenge with this project was building the plane while we were flying it, as this was Forum One’s first narrative-based scrolling site. The client hired copywriters to work on the content, and they provided what they had every couple of months. The client was also sending us photo suggestions from their archives as the content was being written. We would replace the placeholder images with the final photos and copy while providing feedback about how long content should be and whether photos would work or not as we were designing the layout without knowing how long it would be overall and without a final scrolling pattern in mind.

It was important to balance the amount of micro-interactions that we had so that it would be a predictable and delightful experience for audiences, and so that our developers would be able to complete the work on time.

It was a really challenging and fulfilling project, and the work paid off – the website was one of just four in its category to be nominated for a Webby Award in 2021.

Link to live site

Project Goals

• Create an immersive, inspiring experience for users

• Improve upon NRDC’s past timelines

• Demonstrate the impact of NRDC for brand affinity while also looking to the future

Target Users

• Primary Users

• NRDC Partners & Allies

• Supporters & Donors

• New Activists

Team

• Visual Designers: Jamie Bourne, Corey Jones

• Art Direction: Corey Jones

• Script: Joey Tackett

• User Experience Designer: Julia Bradshaw

• Tech Leads: Shawn Brackat

• Back-End Devs: Ryan Jensen, Ben Branyon

• Front-End Devs: Tommy Alter

• Analytics: Adam LaCaria

• Quality Assurance: Mathew Murakami, Stephanie Gutowski

• Account Managers: John Johnson

• Project Manager: Adam Hudson

Duration

• 8 months