We worked with Michelle Kee as part of the traineeship program at Wonderland to evolve her acclaimed graduation project, Learning By Doing It. In need of a more mature brand and elevated immersive online experience, Michelle collaborated with our design team to create the next generation of LBDI.

The project began through re-visting the market positioning and business strategy of the project, re-aligning on the values and creating a strategic design direction to carry the project into the future. Through this we were able to create a strong brand and comprehensive content platform that the LBDI community can share, read and listen to stories on for years to come.

The platform is a space that hold fragments of imperfections, flaws and doubts, and to decide to share these innately personal stories showed a sense of bravery and self-reflection. Therefore, it was essential for the art direction to come across as safe and nonjudgemental, while honouring the rawness and honesty that the stories brought to the table.

The colour palette was selected with the intent to come across genderless and accessible, all the while yielding space for the illustrations to shine. We created a new type system and logo to represent the dance between feminine and masculine. Furthermore, we had the idea to utilise brackets ( ) as a visual representation of the brand. In-between brackets is a safe space, a place where you can be honest or vulnerable about things you might not include in an open sentence. The platform acts like brackets, giving stories the space it needs to become visible, to be heard.

As the website currently houses 35 stories and expected many more to come, it was both a challenge and opportunity to build a strong base that enabled playfulness for visitors and safety for anonymous storytellers. In order to satisfy two types of visitors, the new and returning, we created two different designs for the home page: the playground and index. Through the playground, a new visitor can rummage through the stories, randomly and spontaneously selecting a lesson to listen, whereas the index comes with category tags and titles as a guide, an ideal place for returning visitors to quickly find a story they have in mind.

Similarly, all other aspects of the website was carefully crafted to convey LBDI’s mission and vision. This was especially the case when it came to designing the (Sharing) page. Due to the sensitivity of the topic, it was important for the submission process to be approachable, accepting, and conversational. The outcome is a step-by-step process in which the tone of voice is comforting, length kept short, excerpts from other stories provided to get the storyteller in the headspace and visuals warm and playful.