Peer Health Exchange reimagined their brand to reach Gen Z where they are and share resources to help young people live healthier lives.
Peer Health Exchange started as a small team of undergrads determined to fill health education gaps in their local community. In 2003, the best way to do this was to bring comprehensive health education straight to the classroom. Today, they reach hundreds of thousands of young people across the country.
As Peer Health Exchange began building an identity-affirming, health-focused digital identity for 13-18 year olds, they reached out to us for support building a website that could keep up and scale over time. They wanted to hire someone who understood the assignment.
During my time at Peer Health Exchange, I was introduced to Silvia and her agency. Slam Media Lab is one of the leaders in SEO & web development for social impact organizations. Silvia and her team delivered and created content to reach young people through organic search and designed a beautiful and dynamic WordPress site that represented the direction we wanted. They’re extremely organized, fast-paced, responsive and easy to partner with.
Peer Health Exchange came to us with a static site that needed A) some revamping and B) a little extra love to stand out from the crowd. We delivered with Lottie animations, a lightweight solution for spicing up a site without slowing it down.
Not very often are the target audiences for a website the exact opposite. Designing the Peer Health Exchange site meant creating a site that centered and spoke to young people, while also staying clean and professional enough for donors and partners. We made the site come alive with splashes of gradients, tasteful yet playful animations, and small interactions and animations that tells the PHE story.
Minimalism is out, maximalism is in. We ditched a white-walled site in favor of playful patterns that give each page some saturation and appeal to Gen Z.
Young people are Peer Health Exchange’s first priority, always and forever. We made sure this deep care translated across every page of their website. Case and point: before we even started the build, we ran brand discovery workshops with young people from Peer Health Exchange’s Youth Advisory Board to get clear on the direction they wanted us to go in.
Once we got started designing each page, we retained Peer Health Exchange’s youth-first ethos with animated faces of young people, plain language, and that Y2K feel they asked for. From the home page to the careers page, the org’s deep respect for youth shines through.
