Strategy
Journey Home
The Journey Home is a non-profit launched by the Mayor's Office of Baltimore City in the effort to make homelessness in the city rare and brief. Baltimore City has faced challenges with its homeless population for decades, made more difficult by the sensitivity of the issue. Our objective was simple; bring brightness to a dark subject matter to help bring relief to those in need.
Branding & Creative Support
Brand Development
Zest's Creative Team performed an extensive image and messaging analysis that led to multiple creative concepts that were brought into development stages in support of helping the Journey Home establish a confident identity. The exploration process built on a number of themes, visualizing the "journey" as a path, phrases building on "home is where the heart is", and local sentiments surrounding "Charm City."
Logo Finalization
Multiple variations of image and typography pairings were examined and tested before landing on the final choice. The selection of a "key" as the image was determined to embody much of the mission in providing a forgotten part of the population a level of access and security in their paths. The key incorporated in the logo communicated features a hidden Baltimore skyline. Zest's Creative Team paired Avenir and Din Pro in the text portion of the logo. "The Journey" displayed in Avenir is tracked out to represent the steps Journey Home takes to end homelessness. "Home" is stated in a bold Din Pro to put emphasis on the end goal.
Illustrations
In the effort to remove some of the edge of the conversation and make it appear more personable, we chose to animate and illustrate much of the imagery to support the content. Custom illustrated icons were created for the Home Page of the Journey Home website to create a warmer, less corporate feel. The icons are featured in a content slider module explaining the goals of Journey Home's mission: Affordable Housing, Health Care, Sufficient Income, and Emergency Services.
Warmth
Zest's Creative Team worked to develop custom illustrations that provided supplemental statistics in the Learn the Facts module on the Home Page, as well as the Our Goals section. The style of the illustrations incorporate a distressed texture to create dimension on within the illustration and on the website. However, the cartoon like graphics lend a human element to the information.
Web Development
User Experience
The user experience was supported by completely custom web programming. The custom themes were built out to seamlessly integrate fonts to the logo. Zest's Creative Team paired up Fira Sans and Proxima Nova Condensed to use on the website. The new Journey Home brand colors are incorporated throughout the entire website in use of buttons, text, dividers, and background colors. The pairing of the colors and text work together, in an attempt to create a warm, friendly look for a subject matter that is not as such.
Home Page
The Home Page of Journey Home incorporates all of the brand assets Zest's Creative Team developed. Large background images serve as the background for important information and community opportunities. A very user friendly repeated in the footer helps to aide with navigation of the Inner Pages, by creating quick links for users to choose from.
Custom Modules
The Zest Development Team created a variety of custom modules for that provided integrations with the user-interface to display more complex content. Journey Home provides a lot of statistics, information, and opportunities to the community. We used content and graphic sliders in a few spots to condense content in a user friendly way.
Inner Pages
Inner Page designs mainly feature content based pages. In areas where there was plentiful content accordions were used to condense content in a user friendly way. Each Inner Page features the repeated footer navigation found on the Home Page, a donate call to action, and a contact graphic if a user would like to speak over the phone.
UX/UI Responsive
Journey Home's website is fully responsive, making it simple for a user to view the information on the website easily from any device. Custom modules on the Home Page condense to stacked formations to ensure that no content is lost.
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