Welcome to our Social Ink Showcase

An online translation for the new Global Design Guide, with modular template components and user interface consulting for access, navigation, and distribution.

The MacArthur Foundation’s Safety and Justice Challenge, which focuses on the reduction of over-incarceration in the United States, needed a way to cleanly convey the breadth and depth of the problem.

One piece of the puzzle was an interactive map which automatically plots justice sites directly from the site’s database. Site profiles, which have their own robust template, now appear automatically on the new map.  Our solution allows staff at the Vera Institute of Justice to use the CMS to enter new data-points, update existing ones and connect and tie-in other content (such as press releases) without a single keystroke of code.

Check out similar work with the  IUCN Global Gender Office and HomeSmartNY!

Public Curricula, an online magazine focused on demonstrating the links between technology and social culture, approached us about an issue close to their members’ hearts: openness, privacy concerns and big tech companies.

With Public Curricula team, we devised a comparison tool that allows users to compare information take-down requests from governments across the world, revealing how Google responds in the various countries in which it operates. Importing data via Google’s open database files, we created a simple, visually compelling tool that utilizes predictive typing, infographic comparison and other visual cues to quickly communicate the problem without overwhelming the user.

CivicExplore is a public policy group formed around the creation of Mayor Bill de Blasio’s VisionZero initiative, aiming to investigate the intersection of civic use of public transportation and demographics such as gender, age and race. Using public datasets from the City of New York as well as other projects, CivicExplore communicates comparisons such as:

• The availability of bicycling as alternative energy policy across gender, race and age
• The effect of policing on bicycling as alternative energy policy
• The effect of available other transportation – such as public transit or taxis on bicycling policy

Using the datasets provided to us by CE, Social Ink was able to quickly use tab systems, open charting libraries to visually communicate the disparity CE was aiming to highlight.

For think-tank and policy clients like the Center for Migration Stuides, IUCN’s Global Gender Office and the National Association of City Transportation Officials, our task was to organize mountains of data. From a user experience (UX) perspective, we had to ensure that both casual visitors to the site and academic or government-allied researchers could easily find detailed information

Our tailored solutions involved filtering libraries with predictive searches, collaborative information architecture analysis, sophisticated sorting and finding mechanisms to drill down into content by type, sorting resources, references, case studies and other content into various typologies and classifications.

Our UX Discovery research revealed that many would-be supporters of City Harvest were not aware of how far even a small donation might go. Working alongside the City Harvest communications team, we developed this graphic interactive, using the core City Harvest branding elements to show the dramatic amount of food each dollar provides for hungry New Yorkers.