Vera

The Vera Institute Of Justice has created a site that should be the calling card for all activist website’s to follow. Its strength is in its multiplicity, meaning the differentvisuals, mechanics, and formats they use to reinforce their ideas.

Take this homepage for example, rather than hold users’ hands through some ambiguous opening page, they thrust users right into a deep scroll of information. What is essential though, is that through their multiplicity, they don’t overwhelm viewers with dense text or boring data. Rather, users can scroll through and find videos, publications, external links, and interactive widgets to peak their interest and expand their awareness. This onslaught of multifaceted information wastes no time engaging users’ in the substance of the site, but understands the need to maintain an active user experience while doing so.

If users don’t want to scroll through Vera’s stream like homepage, they can navigate their way to this graphic menu. Here users’ can select a variety of headings, under which new headings of information appear. Each subject links to a uniquely formatted piece of information, and are all accompanied by a handcrafted illustration.

This is a great example of inward out web design. Users are presented with the most reduced and simplistic version of an idea (in this case, a clickable illustration meant to represent a specific categorization). From there they can scope out into bigger and bigger blurbs and informational experiences according to their selections.

This gated experience gives users a tactile sense of manipulation over the site. They’re seeing what they want to see and can easily understand how to navigate this simple site, allowing them to spend less time dissecting the site and more time studying the information at hand.

These last two images are just excellent examples of what was highlighted under the previous two images. This about us page is both indicative of how the gated experience of the site unfolds, and how Vera presents information in a variety of graphic formats.

If a user wants to learn about the relative scale of the American justice system, they click a small icon and are brought to this slightly more involved page. Additionally, the information isn’t just laid out in a text block, but broken into a graphic with more visual appeal.

Lastly, this interactive map allows users to select a state and learn about the prison system in that locality. This is again an example of how the site scopes from simplicity to nuance, and how they format it in a variety of ways. Vera’s site is an all-encompassing multi-format experience whose web mechanics fuel the education process.

Vera is a clean website design in the Non-Profit industry.