About: Southern Coalition for Social Justice is a legal advocacy group dedicated to fighting alongside Black, Brown and low-income people for healthy environments, a fair justice system, and the fearless defense of voting rights.
My role: Digital Content + UX Designer
Timeline: February 2026-June 2026
Tools used: Figma, WordPress, Divi 5, Photoshop
Brand Design: Cardinal
Following a comprehensive rebrand, SCSJ needed a new website that could better represent its evolved visual identity while continuing to serve the communities, advocates, and partners who relied on the existing site. The challenge was not simply to create a new visual experience, but to rethink how a large and content-heavy organization could communicate its work clearly and effectively.
As the UX designer and developer, I guided the project from information architecture and wireframing through visual design, custom graphics, and WordPress development.
One of the most important UX decisions was to retain a similar overall website architecture from the previous site.
Rather than completely restructuring the experience for the sake of a redesign, I considered how existing users had already learned to navigate SCSJ’s content. Maintaining familiar organizational patterns allowed the new site to feel intuitive to returning visitors while giving the interface a much-needed visual and structural refresh.
This became a balance between familiarity and evolution: preserve what worked, rethink what didn’t, and build a more cohesive experience around the new brand.
Wireframes helped establish the underlying structure before visual design began, allowing me to focus on questions such as:
- What might a user need to find first? How might a user of the old site might navigate the new site?
- How do we make complex legal topics feel approachable?
- How can visual language be used to improve user understanding of complex legal work?
- How can related content be connected?
- How can the site communicate the breadth of SCSJ’s work without sacrificing aesthetics?
In addition to designing the front-end experience, I developed the website in WordPress using Divi 5. Building the site myself allowed me to carry the design system through from concept to implementation and ensure that the final product remained faithful to the UX and visual decisions established during the design process.
The development phase focused on creating reusable layouts and components that could accommodate SCSJ’s extensive content library while giving the organization flexibility to manage and expand the site over time.
The redesigned SCSJ website brings together a large and complex content ecosystem with a more approachable, brand-forward digital experience. By maintaining familiar information architecture while introducing a completely new visual system, the redesign creates continuity for existing users without feeling tied to the organization’s previous identity.
The result is a website designed not only to showcase SCSJ’s work, but to make that work easier to find, understand, share, and engage with.
