The Nature Conservancy

Turning dense climate research into a visual system anyone can use

Brand strategy, document design, and UI style guide for a first-of-its-kind green infrastructure platform — translating dense technical research into a cohesive visual system built to move practitioners from data to decision

Project Overview

The GSI Impact Hub is a collaborative initiative — led by The Nature Conservancy, the Green Infrastructure Leadership Exchange, and One Water Econ — that gives cities and communities accessible tools and resources to understand, plan, and implement green stormwater infrastructure (GSI). Its flagship offering is the GSI Impact Calculator: a first-of-its-kind interactive tool that lets practitioners quantify up to 12 economic, social, and environmental co-benefits of a proposed GSI project — from flood risk reduction and job creation to heat mitigation and improved water quality. The platform is free to use, open to municipalities, urban planners, and policymakers across the U.S. and Canada.

Pixel Parlor was brought in to build the visual brand of the platform’s core document suite — five Benefit Guides, a Compendium, Summary Documents, and a hub logo — and deliver a UI Style Guide to Radbridge, the technical partner who designed and developed the calculator and website. Our role: transform dense technical research into a cohesive visual brand that communicates clearly across multiple document formats and scales seamlessly into the digital tool.

360-Degree Branding, Brand Rollout & Marketing Activation, Purpose-Driven & Sustainable Businesses, UX Strategy, Web Design & Development

gsiimpacthub.org

2024–2025

360-Degree Branding
Brand Strategy & Platform
Illustration & Infographics
Brand Rollout & Marketing Activation
UI Style Guide

The Challenge

Green stormwater infrastructure — rain gardens, bioretention facilities, trees, retention ponds, wetlands — does more than manage stormwater. It creates jobs, cools neighborhoods, raises property values, improves air quality, and builds climate resilience. The research proving these co-benefits exists. The problem is that it lives across dozens of technical documents, largely inaccessible to the practitioners and policymakers who need it most.

The GSI Impact Hub was built to solve that access problem. But a platform built around dense technical research only works if people can actually read it. The design challenge was significant: the Benefit Guides, Compendium, and Summary Documents needed to hold serious, data-rich content without becoming walls of text — while functioning as a coherent system across five differentiated guides that all had to read as part of the same family.

And whatever visual language was developed for the documents had to be translated into the website and calculator — which meant delivering not just finished files, but a system Radbridge could build from.

The Goal: Transform dense technical research into a cohesive visual brand that communicates clearly across multiple document formats — and scales seamlessly into a website and digital tool.

Our Approach

We began with a Brand Discovery Workshop — a collaborative session with stakeholders from The Nature Conservancy, the Green Infrastructure Leadership Exchange, and One Water Econ to align on goals, define audiences, and establish creative direction. The findings informed a strategy report that guided everything downstream.

Rather than designing all five guides simultaneously, we designed a single Benefit Guide first, getting full approval before rolling the system out across the remaining guides, Summary Documents, and Compendium. That sequencing protected the coherence of the system: decisions made for the first guide became the foundation for the rest, not a template to fight against.

Upon completion of the full document suite, we delivered a UI Style Guide — typefaces, colors, specs, and visual assets — to Radbridge as the foundation for the website and calculator. Pixel Parlor then provided ongoing creative direction throughout their design and development process, ensuring the visual language established in the documents carried through to the digital tool without losing fidelity.

What We Built

Benefit Guides and Summary Documents. A series of five benefit guides featuring imagery, tables, and infographics highlighting the key advantages of GSI — energy savings, job creation, water and air quality, property values, heat mitigation, and recreation. Each guide is differentiated by brand color while sharing a cohesive template. Each is also distilled into a shorter Summary Document for quick reference.

Compendium. A comprehensive overview of the full GSI Impact Hub project, incorporating maps, tables, and data alongside curated supporting resources. The document that holds the whole system together for practitioners who need the full picture.

GSI Impact Hub Logo. Developed to complement the supporting partner logos — The Nature Conservancy, Green Infrastructure Leadership Exchange, One Water Econ — and serve as the primary visual identity for the online hub. The icon: a leaf and water droplet converging and being analyzed, reflecting the project’s core themes of nature-based solutions and measurable impact.

UI Style Guide. A complete design handoff package — typefaces, colors, specs, visual assets — delivered to Radbridge as the foundation for the website and GSI Impact Calculator. The guide that ensured the visual language of the documents carried through to the digital experience without losing coherence.

The Impact

The GSI Impact Hub launched publicly in March 2025 — a free, first-of-its-kind platform serving practitioners, advocates, policymakers, and community leaders across the U.S. and Canada. The work is being presented at WEFTEC 2025, one of the leading water quality conferences in the world.

The visual system Pixel Parlor built is doing the work it was designed to do: making dense, data-rich research navigable for the people who need it. Five differentiated guides read as a coherent family. Summary Documents give practitioners the fast version when they need it. The Compendium holds the full picture. And the UI Style Guide gave Radbridge the foundation to build a calculator and website that feel like they belong to the same system as the documents — because they do.

For The Nature Conservancy and its partners, the platform represents a significant step toward making GSI a standard practice in urban and suburban development — “ensuring that every community benefits from cleaner air, better water, and reduced heat.” The design system we built helps that mission reach the people positioned to act on it.

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