To commemorate its 100th anniversary, the Council wanted to create a digital experience to highlight a selection of its rich archival assets and tell the story of the organization and of foreign relations over the past century. The site’s intended audience was primarily existing members who were already familiar with the CFR story and history. To keep the content engaging for these members, as well as an unfamiliar global audience, it needed to be presented in a clear and compelling narrative.

Our process began by identifying the tentpole narratives and multimedia assets, as an outline for the content and user experience. The goal was to accomplish a complete historical picture using a variety of interactive storytelling techniques, in a presentation that allowed for users to explore the story in a non-linear way. The solution is an interactive experience with sections for the CFR timeline, a membership evolution infographic, photo gallery of notable speakers, “This Day in History”, and more—each with a unique style of interactive presentation, each their own self-contained “episode”.

To fully realize the large, complex build while maintaining performant experience and responsive design, all while working within rigid timelines, Ronik collaborated with our development partner, Perpetual, for the implementation. Parallel work processes of content creation with the client team and iterative design and development allowed for maximum efficiency, while frequent touch points between all our teams ensured all development considerations were kept in mind throughout the design process. 

Following the launch of the site, the CFR team had planned additional content to be added to the site throughout the year as the centennial celebrations continued. To allow for this drip of additional site updates, we provided the design system and back-end for CFR’s development team to seamlessly pick up and evolve as needed.

Celebrating a Century: An Interactive History

Our creative process was guided by Urban Quotient’s human-centered ethos, their design process, and their existing brand identity. While the logo would remain, we connected elements of the firm’s approach with visual and interactive metaphors of the namesake “quotient” to create a new, distinctive design language.

To support the high quality case studies and assets, a customizable, modular Case Study template was implemented in the content management system. This structure allows content editors to quickly and intuitively build Case Study pages with a robust toolset of storytelling components that result in a cohesive yet organic feel.

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The logo—a sharp representation of the “quotient” concept—was given movement on the homepage to give it an active, adaptive feeling, changing from its full to symbolic form. For distinctive visual flair that speaks to the firm’s design process, we animated computational drawings taken directly from UQ projects, serving as the building block of the identity.

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Reflecting an architecture firm’s unique vision

ronik

Urban Quotient

Reflecting an architecture firm’s unique vision

Urban Quotient turned to Ronik to reimagine their digital experience. Our solution is a flexible portfolio and presentation tool that allows the architecture firm’s storytelling and unique approach to shine through.

Council on Foreign Relations