Gates Foundation K-12 Education
Built a custom WordPress site for the Gates Foundation's K-12 education initiative, balancing sub-brand identity with the parent brand system.
The Gates Foundation operates as a brand family — a parent brand with sub-brands for each initiative like K-12 Education, Strategic Investment Fund, and Postsecondary Success. Each sub-brand needs its own identity while still feeling unmistakably like a Gates Foundation website. That tension between consistency and distinctiveness was the core design challenge.
I worked on this project at GMMB, the marketing agency where the Gates Foundation was a key client. We built several of their initiative websites, and this was a new one at the time.
We chose WordPress with Advanced Custom Fields, which was already in use across their other properties. Keeping the CMS consistent meant their internal team could manage content across sub-brands without relearning tools. ACF gave our designers and developers the customizability we needed to create a minimal design system for the site — reusable components that stayed on-brand but gave the K-12 initiative its own visual personality.
Responsive design and page speed were top priorities. Some of the existing Gates websites had issues with both in 2017, which we saw as table stakes. Performance mattered especially because the foundation's audience included users in countries with lower bandwidth — the site needed to load fast and work well regardless of connection quality.