REBRANDING: GOP & GOVERMENT

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GOP REBRAND

Challenge

The Republican or Grand Old Party is often plagued by the stigma of being outdated both from an idealism and design perspective. The brand as a whole is now often categorized by younger generations as irrelevant including how it delivers its opinion (social and otherwise). The struggle is how to connect on a deeper level with younger audiences through the web and through brand identity.

Approach

Many finer points went into the rebrand and web approach, but here are the overarching considerations. The design strategy for this concept was built with the intention of creating election season branding and materials. Materials used in public could have a fresh face with traditional values, which the Republican party decidedly prides themselves on. The branding has to be modern enough to connect with newer generations while remaining classic and familiar to the majority, and tailored enough to be taken seriously in formal settings.

The web approach is simple and streamlined. The current GOP site hints at a more updated approach, but fails in many ways. It wants every piece of content to be a priority making it visually over stimulating to the user. It's a prime example of too many cooks in the kitchen making decisions about user interface that are misguided or are uninformed. The user is inundated by buttons, icons with text, boxes, disjointed featured content, a red contribute (donation) button with a centered, competeing red GOP logo box in the middle, odd sign up and search connected options, and on and on… I’m getting exhausting even typing about it. For comparison, look at the current GOP site.

Results

Point is there are main sections they care about and feature often. I made those the main pages. Giving the site defined hierarchy gives the user something more direct to work with and lets them peruse what the site NEEDS the user to care about. They put a lot of stock into gathering volunteers and donations, therefore it’s kept as a feature the user sees at all times in the menu without competing against articles GOP wants you to focus on in the main site space. There is visual consistency by limiting the amount of page layouts. I’ve counted at least 9 on the current site, which is unsettling moving from page to page. I’ve limited it to 5. Yes in the real world you could add one more if you really needed to. They have a very active blog I turned into “In The Know” because it gave it more presence, a sense of importance and knowledge. It's up-to-date without being cookie cutter. Beautiful, but simple and easy to use.

EVENT

SIGNAGE & PASS

ONLINE & MOBILE

SAMPLE MOBILE PROTOTYPE

** CLICK AROUND BELOW **

The secondary icon menu options below are considered a couple of both parties top priorities: gathering volunteers and donations. It needs to be prominent at all times during the desktop experience, but can't overshadow other, more up-to-date information such as the "Trending" (top news) and "In the Know" (GOP blog) sections. Elaboration on the icons functions are shown in the hover state accomplishing two goals of (goal one) rewarding the user with knowledge via the site functionality by (1) adding interactive elements that (2) peek user curiosity in order to (3) (goal two) draw them into engage with two of site's top priorities.

NEWS & MEDIA

It is imperative to streamline news and narrow it down to 3 main categories: news, blogs and media. News encompasses news articles and press releases. Blogs are GOP site generated content. Media stands for multimedia, but was created with video content specifically in mind.

The top of the page features the 3 most recent pieces of content next to the search or three items they wish to keep pinned as featured. Following below is a Top News section showing 9 of GOP’s site most popular content. Everything else below is meant to show at a minimum 4 rows of content in chronological order. If the user scrolls further it auto populates 6 more rows before cutting off and giving the user archival buttons for the 3 main categories.