Below are several examples of my work, with a focus on non-profit and brand design projects. For each work sample, I’ve included a short description of the project scope, design process, results and a description of the tools used, as well as links to live projects.
Brand Design for Flagship Publication
Project: Create a sub-brand identity for the OGP National Handbook, a key set of guidance materials for national members on how to participate in the Open Government Partnership.
Design process: The team leading this project requested a brand that had a DIY/craft style, to speak to the need for members to build reforms in a collaborative, hands-on process, using the dark green color in OGP’s brand kit. I sourced and edited all of the photo assets by hand to align with this vision, using a halftone filter with cut-out paper shapes to evoke the right aesthetic. I also designed the web layout to create the desired user journey, such as creating drop-down content and jump links to make it easier for users to scan the content, and prepared all of the branded print materials.
Result: The Handbook is now available as a web product for the first time, with a clearly recognizable sub-brand that will help it stand out from previous versions and other products.
Tools: Canva, Adobe Photoshop, and WordPress
Link to website: https://www.opengovpartnership.org/national-handbook/
Interactive Storytelling for the Web
Project: Create an interactive web template for a more dynamic storytelling style.
Design process: This product illustrates my experience with creating a design strategy to improve storytelling as well as my ability to distill complex ideas and data into easy-to-understand formats. I took the initiative to research and develop a “scroll effect” module with our external web development team to make OGP’s stories more engaging, which involved sketching out the desired effect and troubleshooting the module to check for bugs and to make adjustments. This story on grand corruption, which involves a lot of content and data, was the perfect test case to show how the scroll effect could break up text, help center an abstract story on a concrete example, and make data visualizations easier to understand.
Result: Following the success of this first blog as a proof of concept, I am using the scroll effect module for an upcoming series of long-form stories on anti-corruption and digital governance reforms.
Tools: Canva and WordPress
Link to website: https://www.opengovpartnership.org/who-is-behind-grand-corruption-blog/
Website Redesign and Coding
Project: Choose an existing company and rebuild their website from scratch using CSS, HTML, and JavaScript.
Design process: For the “Introduction to Web and Mobile Design” class at Parsons, I did a brand redesign of the MOM’s Organic Market website to better capture their ethos as a community grocery store that supports food banks and recycling initiatives. Using my Figma mockup as a guide, I then built a working homepage and secondary page (“Our Story,” available at the link below) entirely from scratch.
Result: A functional, responsive website that captures the new brand.
Tools: Sublime text editor, GitHub, and Canva
Link to website: https://csocci.github.io/final/
Website Landing Page Redesign
Project: Create a mockup for an existing website, based around a central illustration.
Design process: For my Photoshop class at Parsons, I chose to redesign the Poetry Foundation website to make a cleaner, more compelling landing page that would help drive the user’s focus to the main poetry page of the month. I selected Rita Dove’s poem “Heart to Heart” as my inspiration and designed the heart image in Photoshop to create a pulsing effect that would mimic the “dull tattoo” she describes.
Result: A streamlined landing page that uses a single, eye-catching image to draw in the user.
Tools: Adobe Photoshop
Non-Profit Impact Report Layout
Project: Design an impact report to illustrate the results of grantee projects on environmental protection at the community level for the National Democratic Institute.
Design process: I edited the findings from grantees to emphasize the impact of their work and created a highly visual layout using photos taken on the ground by the Senior Director of the program.
Result: A striking report that centers the voices and advocacy of youth advocates in the Solomon Islands.
Tools: Canva and Adobe Photoshop
Social Media Cards
Project: Create branded social media cards to accompany the campaign around a report launch.
Design Process: These are the first three cards of a social media card deck, summarizing the key findings of a 100+ page report on beneficial ownership data use in five countries. I worked to distill the findings into the key takeaways and created a visual identity for the social media campaign and the report itself. Because this project draws on the metaphor of ecosystems and atoms (a theme that comes up in the report itself) I chose this angular molecule to show the interconnectedness of financial system reforms.
Result: A clean set of cards that will help orient readers on the key takeaways of the report, especially for those who will not read the full version.
Tools: Canva