As part of our ongoing work with public health initiative Resolve to Save Lives (RTSL), Hicks.design redesigned and illustrated their website.
This followed the new identity that we developed in conjunction with the RTSL design team, and the website was the first opportunity to develop how their new visual language translated to online content. This led to a new photographic collage style, using the RTSL logo grid to frame field photographs in large icons constructed using the grid.
An influence in the site was the infamous USDA 'Hay Net' website from 2005. The site was super-focussed to just two navigation options - Need Hay or Have Hay.
While there are more menu options on the RTSL site, the core drive is to their areas of work: Improving Cardiovascular Health and Preventing Epidemics.
Migrating to a Wordpress backend gave the opportunity to start afresh, and build a site design system from scratch to accommodate growth. In future, other RTSL project websites will brought in under the one site, and the system anticipates this. For example, Prevent Epidemics is a sub-project of RTSL, and it's section has it's own dark colour scheme, controlled with CSS variables.
Tailwind (a CSS Framework) was considered, but rejected early on due to its verboseness. Particularly when it came to defining typography. The cascade is such a powerful feature of CSS, and the Tailwind approach ignores this. However, we used utility classes to define where content sits on the grid, and this means the layout can easily be controlled in the Wordpress Gutenberg editor can be styled without needing to add custom CSS styles.
