FDA Office of External Affairs (OEA) Social Media Templates

Coming from the private sector where contemporary trends in design were more prevalent, then Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Scott Gottlieb sought to update the overall look of the messaging coming from the office of the commissioner. I was hired as lead designer– part of a contract that would modernize and unify social media content as well as handle various internal tasks.

As my first major project, I created a suite of social media graphics based on some of the more urgent/most requested items such as safety communications, food outbreak alerts and drug/medical device approvals.

The FDA Visual Identity was notoriously difficult to work within. It was created by an outside ad firm without any internal input from the administration's designers. It lacked an internal logic– its rulesets and color palette often created new design challenges that leadership was not capable of addressing. At the time, all government agencies were required to be 508 compliant, meaning that all published materials needed to meet certain requirements to be accessible to those with disabilities. These sometimes competing conditions often created very narrow results: graphics that utilized mostly blue color treatments with white text. Finding ways to keep things looking fresh was a challenge, but one that ultimately made me a stronger designer.

This is the suite of graphic templates that I developed, covering a broad range of topics. These templates allowed us to unify the look of our communications while increasing the speed of our responsiveness to public health and safety issues.

I also created customizable versions that were used by myself and other OEA designers to help the communications officers craft specialized responses to specific issues.