Philanthropy Colorado

Philanthropy Colorado is a 501(c)3 nonprofit membership organization that strengthens communities across the state by bringing people, information, and resources together. More than 120 member organizations sit under its umbrella, from foundations and corporations to public agencies, and together they shape Colorado's philanthropic ecosystem.

As the organization grew, its website stopped keeping up. They brought in By the Pixel to redesign it, and I co-designed it with our Chief Design Officer. This case study covers that design work: the research, the architecture, the identity, and the handoff.

Stakeholder interviews, a content audit, and a look at peer organizations all converged on one finding: nobody could find anything. Navigation had grown by accretion, content was disorganized, and visual inconsistencies made the site feel less welcoming than the organization it represented.

The redesign's operating principle was simple: fewer clicks, greater clarity. Whatever someone came to do, become a member, register for an event, or find a resource, the path had to be short and obvious.

The old structure had grown page by page until finding anything meant already knowing where it lived. A full content audit and stakeholder interviews established what users actually needed and where the structure failed them, and the answer was consolidation: the streamlined navigation collapses everything into four primary sections, About, Membership, Engage, and News & Resources.

Contextual sub-navigation was modernized rather than discarded, keeping the wayfinding members already relied on while making the whole site easier to navigate and easier for the team to manage.

The organization's spirit was never the problem; the site just didn't express it. The redesign translates that energy into a digital identity: blocks of yellow, purple, orange, and teal put the brand front and center, soft neutrals keep every page polished and welcoming, and confident typography holds it together.

High-contrast buttons, badges, and icons add personality without getting in the way of use, and the whole system is built to accommodate growth as content and programs expand.

Instead of scattering blog posts, news, and resources across separate corners of the site, everything now lives in a single content library that doubles as the organization's thought-leadership hub. Filtering, tagging, and clear categorization let users find exactly what they're after, a policy update, a news article, a downloadable guide, and the consolidation makes the library easier to maintain as it grows.

We designed this site rather than building it. Philanthropy Colorado belongs to a consortium that requires its members to use a specific development firm, so the handoff was part of the product. Documentation, annotations, and specifications live directly in the Figma files: component behavior, responsive layouts, accessibility considerations, and styling guidance, everything that firm needed to build it right the first time.