Lambda Legal x Mosaic Case Study
Lambda Legal is a nonprofit organization with a simple mission—to advance the rights of LGBTQ+ people and people living with HIV—but it’s powered by folks navigating hugely complex systems to create change. This marriage between complexity and simplicity defined our work with Lambda.
Before we entered the chat, Lambda’s website hadn’t been updated in 10 years. Its five decades’ worth of ground-breaking advocacy work was lost in page after page of brain-bending legal documentation that, while impressive, was tough for the average person to navigate.
Our purpose was clear: We needed to simplify—everything—to make the experience more accessible and compel volunteers and donors to take action. But we also needed to make sure none of the thousands of historic documents were lost in the process. The stakes were high—if we messed this up with even a single dead link or misplaced any of the 7,818 media files, we could destroy a critical resource for someone in need.
We used complex problem-solving to simplify the site. The kind of problem-solving that led us from contacting the Library of Congress for permission to update the site to countless hours of flowchart creation based on legacy tech that would confuse even Neil deGrasse Tyson on his best day. We spent months chipping away piece by piece to create intricate and sustainable architectural bones before we even arrived at the site’s storytelling component.
No matter how ground-breaking or important, it’s tough to make people care about legal work. So to compel donors and volunteers, we used a [what would be the design term for this box] on the homepage to emphasize the people and purpose behind Lambda. It infused the experience with a sense of humanity, helping to create a connection between Lambda’s work and visitors to the site.
We also incorporated small details with big impact, like adding a box to the hero image that provides space for Lambda to showcase important happenings without crowding the design. Speaking of boxes, if you look closely, you’ll notice quite a few four-box squares throughout the site’s pages, which we included as a nod to Debbie and her team’s existing branding [what do we want to refer to them as?], creating quiet harmony between the brand and the product.