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Summary of work

FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) Robotics runs one of the world's largest and most celebrated student robotics competitions, engaging tens of thousands of students and mentors worldwide. Their website needed to serve an exceptionally diverse audience: middle and high school students considering joining or already on a team, mentors and coaches managing their team's season, school administrators evaluating the program, corporate sponsors, event organizers, and the general public following competition results.

The visual redesign needed to capture the excitement and energy of the competition — the robotics battles are genuinely thrilling — while organizing the vast amount of information the site needed to contain in a way that each audience could navigate efficiently. The FIRST brand had strong equity with the community but hadn't been updated for some time, and the digital expression lagged behind where it needed to be.

I developed a visual direction that brought the brand's energy forward — more dynamic layout patterns, bolder use of the FIRST color palette, integrated action photography from competitions — while building a component system that could handle the information density the site required.

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Process

The project began with a brand and content audit: reviewing FIRST's existing brand materials, competition photography library, and website analytics to understand which sections and content types were most accessed. This informed both the visual direction and the information architecture priorities.

Visual design development moved from the homepage outward — establishing the overall tone and key components before applying them to interior pages. The competition photography was central to the visual approach, and I worked with the client team to establish usage guidelines that preserved the brand's energetic quality consistently.

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Outcomes & impact

• The redesigned website was approved by FIRST Robotics' communications team and aligned with their planned brand refresh
• The event finder design significantly improved navigability for one of the site's most-used sections
• The visual system provided FIRST with a foundation for extending the digital brand across regional competition sites
• The project was a strong portfolio addition for Mobiquity in the nonprofit/education sector

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Learnings

Designing for mission-driven organizations brings its own kind of design challenge: the community's emotional connection to the brand is deep, and changes need to honor that history while moving the visual language forward. Getting the balance right — familiar but refreshed, energetic but organized — required sensitivity to the FIRST community's culture that went beyond standard brand guidelines.

I also sharpened my skills in designing for photography-forward layouts during this project. When great photography is available, the design's job is to get out of the way and let the images do the storytelling — and that restraint is harder than it looks.