Detroit Means Business

Website Design

CLIENT

DMB

ROLE

UX UI Designer

TIME FRAME

2 Months

OVERVIEW

Vectorform was approached by the City of Detroit who partnered with Detroit Means Business to design a website that could help the people of Detroit navigate the uncertainty and devastating effects of the Covid-19 pandemic. Focused primarily on small business aid, the website can help connect small business owners with grants and loans, teach people how to reopen business safely, and connect people with professional guidance and toolkits. Detroit Means Business is a coalition of private, public, and philanthropic partners dedicated to meet the needs of Detroit’s small businesses).

My role was to design a responsive desktop / mobile website from the ground up, working closely with representatives from the City of Detroit, and the DMB coalition. You can see the website at detroitmeansbusiness.org for more information.

CHALLENGE

Our objective was to create a fully scalable and responsive website, under a tight timeline and a zero-dollar budget. This needed to be an accessible user experience that could cater to a wide demographic while being efficient and lightweight. Content for the website would be created as we designed. Some considerations and constraints include: 

Working within an existing CMS framework
Utilizing an existing and evolving brand language 

SOLUTION

Our solution was to create the website built on the bones of a pre-existing wordpress backend, that would allow easy customization and asset deployment in a backend that anyone would be able to use. With a live version of the site being launched at the end of every weekly sprint, we successfully had a working website up within the first 2 weeks. This project was a pro bono effort and required a lean and strict workflow. The design team executed content modules in the form of design comps, while a second team was configuring the content in the wordpress backend.