From the Nominator

The First Amendment is a weighty topic, even in years not eclipsed by social and political unrest. Our goal was to present a collection of web stories (for the university's homepage) in a way that fundamentally celebrated humanity, while at the same time underscoring the impact of the amendment on an array of academic disciplines, faculty, students, and alumni of the university. 

A large part of the design dealt with the challenges of delivering such a large amount of text to our audience all at once. While each of the five parts of the series could have been published separately, we felt that dividing the stories too much would fragment an otherwise cohesive body of work, the size of which had become its own metaphorical nod to the enormity of the topic we were addressing. The solution was two-fold: orient the audience around the First Amendment, and give them control over how to proceed.

(URI’s homepage is a digital publication, and the pieces featured in our hero space are created to the standards that govern a magazine’s cover story. Because of the intimate relationship of the design and the text, the designer and the writer worked closely throughout the project.)

From the Judges

We found this storytelling presentation to be very captivating. The word animations as well as the highlighted scrolling at the start of the site are powerful and clearly highlight important parts of the first amendment. This digital piece flows well and moves you through all of the content. The photography has drastic lighting but brings warmth and variety by showing a wide range of emotion among all the different individuals. Later, the individual stories are brought to life by using full color photography. There is a lot of text throughout this piece, but the information is presented to you gradually and thus is not overwhelming. Each pull quote is well presented. The design draws you in and gives you the stories in a measured approach.