A group of diverse, strong women.

Project

LEAF - Amplifying Gender Equality Across a Newly Branded and Redesigned Platform

The Women’s Legal Education & Action Fund (LEAF) chose Affinity Bridge as their design and development partner for rebranding their organization. LEAF is a critical national charity that focuses on advancing gender equality for women across Canada through law reform, case intervention, and public education. We worked with LEAF to evolve their brand identity and build a new website that prioritizes sharing their important content with multiple stakeholder audiences.

LEAF cases have resulted in landmark victories preventing violence against women and gender diverse people, eliminating discrimination in the workplace, allowing access to reproductive freedoms, and providing better maternity benefits, better spousal support, and the right to pay equity. Charter rights, in general, and section 15, in particular, have been tested, and strengthened, through the advocacy work of LEAF. 

Visit LEAF's site
Client
Sector
Advocacy Groups
Civil Society
Human Rights
Indigenous Rights
Non-profit
Social Justice
Project Highlights

A new, impactful brand identity and website that can grow with LEAF for years to come

Well categorized, searchable and summarized case data to showcase LEAF’s ongoing work and results

Clear calls-to-action for driving donations and volunteer opportunities

Services
Branding
Design
Discovery Facilitation
Information Architecture
User Experience Planning
Web Design
Technologies
Wordpress
Leaf Homepage

 

Fresh Branding and Data-Driven Organization

As a national legal organization, the content for this project was dense and complex. It required deep collaboration between Affinity Bridge and LEAF to find ways to maintain the integrity of the content while making it approachable for legal and non-legal audiences. 

We approached the project with data-driven decision making and worked with LEAF through three phases.

 

Aligning LEAF's identity with their progressive work

The first phase was to guide the organization through an identity redesign process in order to support their top-level strategic and online goals. We did a deep dive discovery process to get to the heart of LEAF as an organization, and create a new brand that more accurately captured the personality and progressive work they are doing.

The new logo and final design achieved this by establishing an intentional, accurate and consistent representation of their organization through a professional and approachable modern design.

leaf logos
The logo explores the concept of the living tree doctrine of the charter. The logo mark is a tree, with the trunk and branches shown in the negative space. The different coloured segments convey the diversity of women’s experiences and intersecting oppressions that LEAF is working to rectify. The shape is symmetrical on the outside, but the inside components are different sizes – symbolizing the imbalance of the law being brought into balance by LEAF. 

Evidence-based design decisions for a better user experience

The second phase was the development of the website and content management system, which focused heavily on information creation and organization. We started with a user survey which uncovered two key themes:  users were unsure if they were seeing everything connected to a case and they found the site difficult to navigate. We also analyzed user data, and discovered that most users were entering the site via google searches to post pages, and then jumping off from those pages without exploring the site any further.

Leaf before and after
The new design is modern and visual, using black and bright colours to convey the boldness and progressive nature of LEAF's work.

To address these issues, we mapped out desired user journeys and then overhauled the information architecture. We developed a system using content types and tagging in the back end, so that LEAF could tag each case, news, workshop or publication to a bigger issue. This system functions to connect and surface related content, giving the users more points of interest related to the topic they’re interested in. We also introduced case summaries, which connect all the pieces of the case together, and show related case news. 

Leaf inside pages
The new structure surfaces related content based on case or issue area, providing more ways to engage.

 

Next phase: LEAF is going fully bilingual

Lastly, we are completing the project with the translation of the site from English into French, making it 100% bilingual. We're leveraging the WPML WordPress Multi-lingual plugin to make managing translated content quick and easy for this Canadian national organization.

With a fresh brand identity and means to effectively organize their content, LEAF is now able to focus on generating exposure for their critical work in advancing gender equality across Canada.