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Council on Foreign Relations 

The Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) has established itself as a leader in foreign affairs, fostering non-partisan in-depth analysis and reporting on international relations since 1921. With a nearly 100 year old organization and a ten year old website, a digital refresh was needed to modernize the site and enrich its publishing capabilities.

Code and Theory partnered with the CFR to re-platform its flagship digital property, CFR.org with the goal of modernizing its look and feel while maintaining the heritage, authority and prestige and creating a refreshing user experience that captivated users from expert to novice as it continues its mission to expand and inform the foreign policy conversation in the United States.

The result is an immersive reading and watching experience communicating the breadth of offerings to audiences with novice to expert levels of understanding on a modern, modular and responsive design system that empowers content creators through an intuitive and powerful CMS.

 

ROLE   |   Stakeholder Interviews, Landscape Research, Editorial Embed, Audience Development, Content Audit, Site Taxonomy, Experience Feature Development, Organizational Design, Publishing Workflow

 

National Geographic

Code and theory worked with National Geographic to redesign the US and the International sites homepages to provide users with a localized yet global experience across all platforms.

The new site experience positions Nat Geo as a unique destination for all its users through improved articles pages, a toolkit that empowers all editors and a newly imagined homepage, video and hub page experiences. The new homepage provides users with more in depth content as well as discovery through pathing and recirculation. The result allowed Nat Geo to improve scalability as well as their global editorial strategy.

 

ROLE   |   Stakeholders Interviews, Content Audit across many sites, Editorial Strategy, Audience Development, Taxonomy Exercise, Content Strategy, Experience Feature Development, Strategic Vision and Experience Priorities.

 
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The Truth Iniative 

Code and Theory partnered with the the Truth Initiative (previously the American Legacy Foundation) an anti-smoking organization to rebrand and redesign their digital presence. 

In just 12 weeks, we created a digital experience that targeted policy makers, educators, student activists, journalists, and other collaborators by making the site a premier destination for tobacco related news and information. Our strategy was to give the user 4 modes of engagement relationship-building mode, research mode, explore mode, and activist mode. This allowed the user to dictate their objective.

As a result, the website has been universally lauded as one of the premier destination for tobacco-related news and research by journalists and policymakers, and has helped Truth Initiative emerge from its “Legacy” brand. The site has further cemented and reaffirmed Truth Initiative’s position as America’s most effective anti-tobacco non-profit.

 

ROLE   |   Stakeholder Interviews, Content Strategy, Audience Development, Competitive Landscape, Strategic Roadmap, Feature Development

 

New York Life

Code and Theory continued its redesign efforts with a separate workstream to define a world-class Newsroom as a section of the existing newyorklife.com. The corporate Newsroom aims to be a platform for disseminating a variety of important company information such as press releases, thought leadership pieces, corporate social responsibility efforts and more. This engagement focused on defining both a short-term and long-term vision for the Newsroom, outlining a recommended approach to the content, process, personnel and implementation roll-out strategy.

 

ROLE   |   Competitive Analysis, Audience Research, Content Audit, Creative Strategy, Content Strategy, Experience Feature Development.

 
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Fintech Innovation

Code and Theory partnered with a major financial institution* to facilitate agile design practices and processes in their internal innovation unit. Our teams worked together to refine, design, prototype and test client teams concepts for financial solutions. We used participatory design methods to create on the fly creative exercises to capture product requirements and define key features to get ideas rapidly prototyped and tested to gain meaningful insights that could then be implemented across the whole product portfolio.

As a result, we developed an agile design first approach to their work stream that inspired a larger, company-wide shift and evolution in their methods in how they build and develop products.

*Client unnamed due to confidentiality of ongoing work

 

ROLE   |   Stakeholder Interviews/Synthesis, Participatory Design Workshops, Concept Development, User testing, and Key Insights.

 

Webby Awards

The Webby Awards came to us with three main goals: create a Webby Award Site worth a webby, develop a timeless yet flexible site, and make their site more than an awards site but a destination for “everything” web. The result was a modular design system that gave The Webby Awards staff enormous editorial freedom to tell the evolving story of the Internet, tools and modules to help them elevate storytelling, and a site that is beautiful yet relatable by all audiences. We provided them with an editorial content guideline to guide CMS users.

 

ROLE   |   Content strategy, editorial strategy, ux & annotations, content guidelines, concept development

 
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