American-Made Challenges
v1.0 - v1.5
This website supports the American-Made Challenges program, this is where the U.S. Department of Energy and NREL direct users in prize related announcements and press releases. The site contains details about all of the challenges, winner information, official rules documents, and more.
The American-Made Challenges (AMC) program was conceived during the previous presidential administration. The primary goal of the AMC program is to spur innovation in the renewable energy sector, but this was a sensitive topic during that administration. Thus, our team positioned this program as spurring innovation in the American manufacturing sector, an important topic for the previous administration.
Version 1
Given that context, I designed the initial version of the AMC website with influences from the brutalist design movement employing bold red, white, and blue color palettes to resonate with Americana and blue-collar themes such as manufacturing and industrialism. The concept was well-received by appointed positions within the Department of Energy (DOE), who oversaw funding for the program.
To stay within the spectrum of our mission to promote sustainability (even if we couldn't explicitly state those words on our website), I created a custom-developed Jamstack architecture to optimize the site for performance. Some of the techniques used to achieve top performance were: optimizing/compressing all images, minifying all CSS and JS files, tree-shaking for unused code, and defaulting to system fonts rather than relying on a font library.
Additionally, there was great attention to detail for web accessibility compliance. Although the site is not a .gov top-level domain, I maintained compliance with Section 508 accessibility requirements (something that all .gov sites must adhere to).
Version 1 of the AMC remained in use for nearly two years, growing to support a variety of challenges from several DOE offices, including Solar, Geothermal, Advanced Manufacturing, Office of Technology Transfer, Vehicle Technologies Office, and the Building Technologies Office.
Version 1.5
As the site grew, we realized some limitations with the design and architecture. In early 2021, after a couple of years in use – and with a new administration elected to office – it seemed worthwhile to freshen up the landing page. This action helped invigorate the site and extend the current life cycle while brand and site requirements were being defined for a version 2 launch.
Many of the prize subpages remained the same from v1, this work mostly affected the 'branding' level pages and use used as a case study for testing a new identity as our team began discussing v2 requirements.