Free Movement
Free Movement offers updates, commentary and advice on immigration and asylum law. Their mission is to make good quality and clear information available to all affected by immigration control: migrants themselves, their families, their lawyers and their judges. Immigration law has become very complex in the UK and changes very rapidly; they try to make it simple, or at least understandable.
With a huge number of regular subscribers (and growing) to Free Movement, they wanted a fresh design that would focus on improved UX for new and returning users, a striking new look, and to further help those struggling with immigration and human rights issues.
The new Free Movement website rolled out in December 2016, and was an instant hit with its tens of thousands of users - the new design simplified the article pages, the main point of entry, and allowed the content to dominate. New legal services pages more focussed on helping those who are most in need with their human rights and immigration problems make Free Movement an even greater force for good than it already was, which was pretty high indeed!
- Client : Free Movement
- Website : freemovement.org.uk
- Issues : Human Rights, Immigration, Law
- Services Offered : Website Design, Website Development, Consulting
The Challenge
With tens of thousands of regular visitors to Free Movement, it was very important to work with the existing visual design system to not change too much, too quickly. We built upon a well-established look and general navigation, and improved the appearance, UX flow, and made it easier to discover additional features of the site, such as digital legal advice like video chats and online legal application checking.
A language of images
Free Movement's logo is a migrating bird (during this process we learnt a lot about which birds migrate, and which do not - although don't test us on that!); the new orange gradient was reminiscent of birds flying against a sunrise backdrop.
This helped to inspire a new visual language that used beautiful imagery of sunrises and landscapes as big bold image headers, gradient overlays across all images to make them just that little bit more "Free Movement".
Typography
We were very excited to use a typeface called 'Tofino' by Alanna Munro - a Swiss inspired typeface designed specifically for the screen. As a human rights & immigration law blog, we couldn't sacrifice readability or professionalism for stylishness - and Tofino was the perfect fit, being both modern & a little fun, whilst highly legible and practical.
Colour
We took the existing colour palette, built around two shades of solid orange, and with very minimal tweaking turned it into a modern gradient that could be used sparingly throughout the site, alongside the two colours that made up the gradient. We developed existing features to help those most in need of the Free Movement website that were not being taken fully advantage of – improving the UX, design & flow.
