The Challenge

Brooklyn.Org is the first and only public foundation for Brooklyn—New York City’s largest and proudest borough of nearly 3 million people. The organization was ready for a radical reinvention. New York agency Mother Design had created a warmer, more human brand identity to move the organization away from its old corporate feel toward something that felt genuinely “more Brooklyn.” My job was to take that brand and interpret it to the website.

‍

My Role

Working from wireframes developed by a UX Designer and a Content Strategist at Teal, I served as Art Director and UI Designer. I was responsible for interpreting the new Brooklyn.Org brand for a digital context. I built out the full design system and ensured every interaction and visual detail felt cohesive, considered, and true to the colorful brand.

This required making dozens of decisions about how to bring the brand’s warmth, boldness, and community focus into a system of reusable components, interactions, and page layouts.

‍

Building the Design System

A central design motif is the signature use of colorful frames—a structural graphic element that appears throughout the site as a bold brand expression. I developed a systematic approach to how the frames interact: defining which color pairings were allowable in the system, and how the frames could flex across different content types and page contexts without breaking the brand’s integrity.

The result was a color combination system that gave staff and developers clear rules to follow—ensuring the components would always feel intentional and on-brand, whether applied to a testimonial, an event listing, or a community story. This kind of systematic thinking extended across the full design system—from typography scales to component states. We even extended this system to social media templates that let Brooklyn.Org staff create posts that seamlessly matched the site’s sophisticated visual language.

The Outcome

Launched in October 2023, the site has driven significant results:

• 70% increase in time users are actively engaged on site
• 120% increase in visibility on Google Search results
• 18% increase in total audience growth
• $15,000 in monthly traffic value from organic search
• Webby Award Winner

“We’ve received phenomenal feedback from our board and others about the site—the response has truly been incredible. The site is such a beautiful thing to behold.”
–Jameela Syed, Communications Manager, Brooklyn.Org

Credits

Designed at Teal Media
Content Strategist: Melanie Starkey
Wireframes: Ryan Co
Development: Joey Hernandez
Marketing Design: Jason Liu
Project Manager: Leidy Restrepo