American Bar Assoc.

The American Bar Association’s digital board was ready to update their collection of over 30 analogous digital sites. They needed a consistent look across their many sections, and wanted a fresh look to appeal to the next generation of lawyers.

To modernize the site visually, I explored how colors, typography, illustrations, and data visualizations could bring a fresh new feel to this respected institution. With a team of 3, we used typography, color palettes, interaction animations, and various layouts to design a collection of pages that formed a design system for the new brand style.

To help users find content faster, the site's navigation is centered around a feed—an infinite scroll of story cards. Some of the highest trafficked sections were events, CLE courses, recent legal news, and an e-commerce page for purchasing educational materials and ebooks.

Within those sections, editors would create content feeds from a collection of components. My main focus was to design a responsive collection of cohesively designed components, and we evolved the sections into new feature pages.

Below are some early design explorations presented to the ABA digital board to help create the new www.americanbar.org

Our hypothesis was this modern, mature brand style and architecture paired with engaging photography would create a more immersive content discovery experience, and it did. The redesign increased time spent on site and membership renewals, both key goals for ABA.

Project Team:

Adam M Morris - Associate Design Director

Micah Lindenberger - Senior Product Design

Robert Gorrell - Creative Strategy Lead

Shaili Das - Senior User Experience

Layna Olmsted - User Experience

Michael Duke - Technology Director