2015

Site

obamawhitehouse.archives.gov

Team

James Hobbs, Senior Designer
Ashleigh Axios, Creative Director

The wh.gov homepage was one of the most visited pages in the federal web ecosystem — receiving millions of unique visitors each month — and it wasn’t living up to that responsibility.

The existing experience relied on rotating carousels, tabbed content, and a separate mobile theme that stripped away most of what desktop users could see. Key content was buried. Engagement was low. The design wasn’t meeting people where they were.

The responsive redesign aimed to fix that from the ground up. Working closely with the creative and product team at the White House Office of Digital Strategy, I contributed UX and product design across the full arc of the project — from diagnosing the structural problems with the existing layout to building a flexible, device-agnostic template that could support the pace of a live administration. The new homepage launched in the spring of 2015, marking the first time WhiteHouse.gov had ever delivered a consistent experience across screen sizes.

The design prioritized hierarchy and clarity above all else: the most important content at the top, a visual logic that matched the weight of what was being communicated, and a layout flexible enough to accommodate the tonal range of White House communications — from policy announcements to behind-the-scenes photography. The result was a homepage that felt both more human and more purposeful, with measurably higher click-through rates across all featured content.

Key contributions and outcomes:

• Established a responsive, device-consistent layout that replaced separate mobile and desktop experiences

• Redesigned content hierarchy to surface priority items and reduce reliance on hidden carousels and tabs

• Built a flexible header system supporting varied formats — text, image, video — without breaking the template or brand standards

• Supported a photography-forward content strategy that improved transparency and visual engagement

2015

The State of the Union is one of the most-watched political events of the year — but for the Obama White House, it was also an opportunity to push the boundaries of what a live digital experience could be.

The 2015 Enhanced SOTU built on several years of iteration, each version adding more depth and interactivity to the experience viewers could access at wh.gov/sotu while watching the President’s address.

The centerpiece of that year’s experience was the “river of content” — a live-updating stream of supporting material that flowed onto the page in real time as the speech progressed. Rather than a static set of charts and graphics, the river was designed as a series of discrete, self-contained content modules — each offering a deeper, often personalized look at the policies being discussed. Viewers could explore state-by-state data, respond to prompts, and interact with the administration’s message in ways previously more common to product launches and live sporting events than presidential addresses.

On the technical side, the experience was built to allow our team to push content directly to users’ browsers the moment it was published — without requiring repeated page refreshes or sacrificing platform performance. The full experience was responsive across desktop, tablet, and mobile, and included real-time captioning in both English and Spanish, extending both accessibility and reach.

I contributed UX and product design across this project as part of the broader Office of Digital Strategy team, working to shape how these real-time content pieces were structured and presented within the live experience.

Key contributions and outcomes:

• Designed UX for a real-time content stream that complemented a live presidential address without competing with it

• Contributed to a modular content architecture that allowed policy-specific material to be surfaced dynamically during the speech

• Supported a second-screen experience designed for viewers watching the address on TV while following along on their devices

• Helped extend the administration’s reach across social platforms through integrated real-time social feed curation

• Contributed to an experience that brought measurably higher audience engagement and participation compared to prior years’ SOTU digital efforts

40,000+

Email Sign-ups

18,000+

Poll responses

17,000+

Content Shares

2016

The Nuclear Security Summit brought together heads of state and senior government officials from over 50 countries to address one of the most consequential challenges in global security: keeping nuclear materials out of dangerous hands. For the 2016 summit — the fourth and final convening of the process — the White House needed a logomark that could carry the full weight of that legacy. It had to communicate strength and resolve, while also reflecting the genuine optimism of what years of international cooperation had accomplished.

As the sole designer of the logomark, I was responsible for translating all of that into a single mark — something that could represent a multinational effort, stand up at any scale, and feel like a fitting capstone to the summit series.

The visual concept centered on a few core qualities: bold, serious, and contemporary, but with a sense of optimism underneath. The icon draws a deliberate reference to nuclear imagery — grounded in a recognizable form while staying clean and restrained. It was also designed to anchor whatever it appeared on, holding up equally well at badge size or stretched across the exterior of a convention center. No ornamentation, no flourishes — just a mark that could carry the moment.

Hot Take

What I didn’t fully appreciate when I took the project on was just how significant an event this was. I’ll be honest: I initially assumed this was one of many high-level White House convenings — important, but contained. That assumption got corrected fast. A few days before the summit, I was walking through Washington, D.C. and came across street closures and a security perimeter spanning several blocks around the Walter E. Washington Convention Center. My logomark was on full display across the exterior of the building. Seeing it at that scale — in that context — was a different kind of design feedback than I was used to.

A few days after the event, the photos came in. And then, somehow, the logo ended up on Last Week Tonight with John Oliver. Clearly it made an impression.

Lesson learned: never underestimate the reach and scale of your work.