030: A new brand and website for YouthPolicy.org

About a year ago, we received an incredibly nice email from Andreas Karsten, the CEO of Youth Policy Labs (YPL), which began:

Dear Village Onesies, my name is Andreas, and I work for Youth Policy Labs, a non-profit think tank, where we develop and support public policies for young people around the world. We are Berlin-based, with an international and intercultural team of 20 lovely souls who all believe in the power of non-commercial work. We have two projects coming up for which we need some thinkers and tinkerers, and as big fans of your experiment to run a business as a cooperative, we thought we'd ask you first. [...]

Lo and behold, we were invited to Fürstenberg to meet the YPL team at their annual off-site and to understand better what they do as an organization.

The informal off-site visit was then followed by a more formal in-person workshop at the YPL office in Berlin-Wedding, facilitated by Harry and Christoph. During the workshop, we understood better who youthpolicy.org’s target audience is, its place in YPL’s ecosystem, and the main issues with the current website. And like many websites, what initially worked well was eventually outgrown with time due to ever-evolving needs, design languages and technology. And one of the YPL team's main wishes was to redesign the fact-sheets—the most crucial content on the website— so they would more accurately reflect the team's extensive research on young people and youth policy worldwide.

Once we collected all these insights, we shifted into building mode. It was the second project for our then-brand-new designer Julia, and she excelled at it! Not only did she create a brand that is now “approachable, trustworthy, organized, yet subtly rebellious”, and turned it into new website designs, she also instantly became a great two people team with our full-stack developer Sev.

In the meantime, Sev scraped and migrated all the articles and library data from the old WordPress site to our preferred CMS, Craft, and then began turning Julia’s designs into code.

We also gave the YPL team access to the new CMS, so they could already start populating it with content, update the fact-sheets with new data they had been collecting, and giving us feedback, while familiarizing themselves with the new site.

When all was finally in place, Andreas and Sev moved everything to a production instance that is self-hosted by YPL, configured the domain and the redirects.

The result of this collaboration was launched in February, celebrated by YPL with this lovely Mastodon toot:

And as for us, this projects was (to say it in Harry’s words) “too good to be true“. Not only does it perfectly align with our project wishlist/blocklist, but throughout it, we became friends with Andreas and his YPL team. So much so that some of us now regularly co-work from their cozy office in Wedding, and we've already started working on another project together. But more about that at a later time. Stay tuned!

PS: Doro and Fei were both involved during the initial scoping of the project, supported the preparation of the workshops, and Doro played a crucial role in reworking the website's information architecture.