Client
JPI Oceans
Role in project
UX/UI designer
Services
UX/UI Design
Research
Branding
Year
2023
About this project
Creating a digital home for a new European ocean partnership.
The Sustainable Blue Economy Partnership (SBEP) is a Horizon Europe initiative supporting ocean health, innovation, and sustainable growth across Europe. In early 2023, I was brought in to collaborate and coordinate with a design agency to create the partnership’s first public website.
Overview
Context of the new partnership.
-
SBEP was a newly formed initiative with growing visibility but no central online presence. Early communications were scattered across PDFs, press releases, and email chains. This made it difficult for stakeholders to:
- position a new partnership in a crowded landscape
- hard to engage
- have a new system
Challenge
Introducing the Sustainable Blue Economy Partnership.
- Design the very first website for a new EU ocean initiative without an existing brand, content structure, or user awareness, and make it stand out among dozens of similar partnerships.
Design principles
A restrained palette of warm amber, kraft beige, and deep espresso brown brings tactile, natural warmth.
- Clarity over completeness
- Focus on the essentials: who SBEP is, what’s happening now, and how to join.
- Structure as a signal
- Use content hierarchy and layout to reflect transparency and reliability.
- Designed to grow
- Build a flexible system that the team can scale over time without redesigns.
Approach
The brand extends across various touchpoints, reflecting a cohesive visual rhythm.
- Homepage
- The homepage acts as an orientation layer: introducing the partnership, surfacing active calls, and linking into deeper sections.
- Visitors should understand SBEP’s role in under 10 seconds.
- Calls & events
- A streamlined hub for funding calls and stakeholder events was needed for clear, timely, and easy action.
- Users can filter by date or topic, view key deadlines at a glance, and register or apply directly from the page.
- About & partners
- We structured content around the real questions users had.
- What is SBEP?
- Who is involved?
- How does it work?
- The partners section uses a country-indexed map and a browsable logo grid.
CMS + Accessibility.
The brand extends across various touchpoints, reflecting a cohesive visual rhythm.
- I designed content structures and layout templates that could be easily implemented in a CMS by the development team. From the start, I prioritized accessibility: using clear hierarchy, generous spacing, and WCAG-compliant contrast across all components. manage over time.
- The mid-fi prototype defined how content types like Calls, Events, and Partners would scale, which is visually consistent and easy to
Results
3x
event and call engagement up compared to pre-launch PDF traffic
25%
lower bounce rate on new homepage
20%
more positive feedback from EU stakeholders
