For non-profit The Humanity Initiative, I designed and built a new site to drive higher engagement with their unique blend of content and archive of inspiring commencement speeches.

role: Design and Build
team: Freelance
Identity UX/UI Front-end CMS TailwindCSS GSAP Statamic

Core to The Humanity Initiative's engagement with visitors worldwide is their archive of inspiring commencement speeches, collected over thirty years. These are cross-indexed with other suggested content, encouraging nonlinear paths of exploration and discovery. A sense of calm, positivity and illumination inspires repeat visits.

A major challenge was finding a way to present ostensibly disconnected content such that connections are suggested and browsing feels expansive and seductive, rather than dissonant. Closely nested cards, built on a randomizer, allow content to be sorted, filtered, or simply experienced in a low-friction, intuitive fashion, the organic grid working with the various aspect ratios of the images while also creating visual rhythms and breaking up what might otherwise appear more transactional and unapproachable.