Animals Australia Website

While Animals Australia—Australia’s foremost animal protection agency—has cultivated a significant global following, their brand and digital ecosystem had become diluted. Their campaign and advocacy efforts were well recognised and publicised internationally, but comparatively few people recognised Animals Australia as the overarching instigator of these powerful activities. Equally, they had over 2000+ disparate campaigns and digital content pieces, many with distinct brands and visual conventions. They sought a new visual language and consolidated publishing platform to convey the maturity of the organisation as a major advocacy body, standing the team in proud stead for the next chapter of their efforts.

Animals Australia are active in so many crucial areas: from investigating live export to campaigning against deforestation, and everything in between. As a result, they need a versatile, scalable and robust design system—coupled with equally flexible content publishing tools—to facilitate impactful stories that span the full breadth of their activity. Informed by valuable research, the new website meets prospective supporters on their terms, offering curated guidance through content and concepts regardless of their familiarity with Animals Australia’s mission. As such, it’s a system that closely aligns with the ethos of the organisation: one built on accessibility, compassion, and instigating change.

The new Animals Australia website unifies previously disparate campaigns into a consistent system with a robust and flexible suite of modular components. This gives their team the flexibility to build and publish cohesive content and campaigns pages instantly. Crucially, they’re empowered to advocate for—and elicit crucial donations to facilitate—kindness as issues and respond around the world in real-time. For example, creating campaigns to support animals on the ground as the Ukraine crisis unfolded, or in response to other issues as they evolve in global news cycles. Further, the website is playing a crucial role in acquiring new supporters.

Built through a process of collaborative co-design practice—and informed by detailed research conducted with existing and prospective supporters—the Animals Australia (AA) website represents an exciting new chapter of maturity for a visionary, world-renowned organisation. A robust design system consolidates the AA brand identity through defined boundaries, offering clarity for AA’s many content creation teams, while promoting cohesion and consistency for their campaign and advocacy efforts. From a purely aesthetic perspective, while minimalistic, a refined three-colour palette (pared back from a more extensive palette) allows enormous flexibility both in layout and conveying tone. The approach strengthens their position as thought leaders by building a flexible design system that is clean and confident, incorporating large blocks of white space and leveraging powerful imagery to tell the story of their mission and impact. We built upon their heritage by updating brand typography to new fonts that echoed their old world, but provide a subtle modern twist through a wider breadth of weights and greater accessibility. The use of illustration was also overhauled, with a more abstract illustration style employed across the site and design system. This ensures animals aren’t reduced to a graphical device, and helps ground their representation in reality.