Work: Education · Public archive

Making labor history visible.

A public home for the images, words, voices and films of working people — from slavery and colonialism to today.

Organization
Georgetown University
Platform
WordPress on Pantheon
Role
UX strategy, UI, development, accessibility
Timeline
11 months

Built with historians from

  • Georgetown University
  • MIT
  • Columbia University
  • Duke University
Explore lhrp.georgetown.edu (opens in a new tab)

The work

An archive designed and built for students, teachers and historians to actually use.

The Labor History Resource Project (opens in a new tab) brings scholars, labor educators and activists together around one collection. It took UX strategy, interface design and a full WordPress build, including five months of accessibility development so that everyone can use it.

The Labor History Resource Project home page: a dark hero of a young mill worker under the LHRP wordmark, the Discover exhibits and resources on parchment, the mission statement and the footer.

400+

Curated resources — oral histories, audio, film, documents and teaching pages.

12+

Templates built in Elementor.

98.8

Siteimprove WCAG AA accessibility score.

5

Months of accessibility development to get there.

The brief

  1. Four institutions, one brief

    Historians at Duke, MIT, Columbia and Georgetown each arrived with a different idea of what the site was for. The first job was turning those into one brief everybody could build against.

  2. Built for the classroom, and for anyone learning

    Students, teachers, organizers and a curious public — not archivists — are the people who have to find things here. The structure follows how they look, not how the collections are filed, and the writing is plain language, with no academic shorthand between a reader and the record.

  3. Images, words, voices and film

    Four kinds of source material, each read differently. Shared components hold them together without flattening them into the same card.

  4. An archive for every reader

    An archive that shuts readers out is not a public archive. WCAG AA was the starting condition of the design, not a fix after an audit.

Inside the project

When Teachers Mobilize

A subsite on the wave of educator strikes that began with West Virginia’s 55-county walkout in 2018. It is organized the way people go looking for this history: by place, across nine states and cities; through oral histories, with teachers telling it in their own words; by strikes and protests; and through photographs and film.

Explore When Teachers Mobilize (opens in a new tab)
The When Teachers Mobilize overview: its hero under the LHRP wordmark, tabs (geography, oral histories, strikes and protests, audiovisuals), the project’s story, then articles, oral histories, PDFs, photo and video galleries.

Brand guidelines

Archival ink and gold, on parchment.

Near-black ink frames the archive, in the header, the hero and the footer, and warm parchment carries the collection between them. A family of golds runs through both, from the bright gold of the wordmark to deeper golds that stay readable as text and buttons on parchment. Cardo sets the wordmarks and the big titles; Poppins does the rest.

Typefaces

Display face

Cardo

  • 700

Text face

Poppins

  • 400
  • 600
  • 700

Color

  • Ink Header, hero and footer grounds; headings On white 18.64:1 AAA #13130D
  • Body Body copy on parchment On white 14.25:1 AAA With ink 1.31:1 Fail #2B2B24
  • Parchment Page ground On white 1.09:1 Fail With ink 17.17:1 AAA #F7F6EC
  • Linen The mission statement’s ground On white 1.18:1 Fail With ink 15.82:1 AAA #EEEDE0
  • Logo gold Wordmarks: LH, Resource Project On white 2.01:1 Fail With ink 9.26:1 AAA #DFAF5F
  • Gold Buttons on dark, in ink type On white 2.06:1 Fail With ink 9.05:1 AAA #D4B066
  • Light gold Eyebrows on dark On white 1.84:1 Fail With ink 10.14:1 AAA #D9BC7B
  • Bronze Get Involved, in near-white type On white 5.14:1 AA With ink 3.63:1 Large only #8D6716
  • Deep gold Eyebrows and links on parchment On white 6.43:1 AA With ink 2.9:1 Fail #7A5912
  • Bone Navigation and footer text on dark On white 1.23:1 Fail With ink 15.17:1 AAA #EBE9CF

In use

Type · Cardo and Poppins

We are historians
preserving labor history

An LHRP Production

When Teachers Mobilize

The causes, organizing, successes and ongoing legacies of a movement of educators, through oral histories and digital media.

Explore the project

Get involved

Display · Cardo
Bold
Heading · Poppins
Bold
Eyebrow · Poppins
Semibold · caps · +0.14em
Body · Poppins
Regular

On dark · header, hero and footer

LHRP

A Living History

American Labor:
Past & Present

Historians, scholars and activists preserving the history of working people and their movements.

Learn more

Labor History Resource Project

Scope

Next case study Seeing the land change, from orbit and from the ground

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