Creating an Ambitious New Web Platform for The Lancet Countdown
Launching The Lancet Countdown’s New Website and Platform in Time for its 2019 Report on Climate Change and Human Health.
The world’s most prestigious medical journals, The Lancet has recently published The Lancet Countdown: Tracking Progress on Health and Climate Change 2019 report. Univers Labs has partnered with The Lancet Countdown, curators of the most extensive study which focuses on monitoring the link between climate change and human health. The report itself, brings together the work of over 120 experts, including doctors, climatologists and biologists, and focuses on 41 key indicators such as health and extreme weather events, food security and air pollution.
Connecting a wider audience to the effects of climate change on human health
Our role was to develop a bespoke website and data platform for The Lancet Countdown to communicate the findings from their annual report more effectively to their varied audiences, consisting of health professionals, policymakers and the general public.
The Univers Labs team undertook in-depth workshops and discovery to identify the needs of The Lancet Countdown and determine the most appropriate digital strategy to reach these goals. We brought together data journalists, strategists, illustrators, developers and UX designers to create a new, bespoke website for The Lancet Countdown, to present the findings from their annual report in several ways and better engage with their audiences.
A Bespoke Website and Data Platform for The Lancet Countdown
Our team developed and designed a new bespoke website for The Lancet Countdown with a flexible modular layout CMS, allowing administrators the ability to easily create new pages, amend content including all text, images, resources and video.
We also introduced a bespoke data platform into the new website, integrating with the Flourish visualisation platform. This new data platform features 41 data visualisations, allowing users to observe and navigate through the key indicators from the report in a more engaging way. We also designed and implemented five illustrations to represent graphically the five main categories into which the various indicators were grouped within the 2019 report.
Video Production
In addition to the new data platform, our production team at Univers Labs produced an animated video, interactively presenting the key findings from the 2019 Lancet Countdown report. Our team oversaw numerous critical aspects of this video, including the storyboarding, voice over, design, animation and musical composition.
A Redesigned Resources Page
The Lancet Countdown produces a range of highly regarded research materials which are extensively used by governments, policymakers, health professionals and the public. We redesigned the resources page, allowing users to explore the data, resources and reports, ensuring that users can quickly and easily access pertinent information in a format that’s most relevant to their work and needs. We also implemented search filters into the resources page, allowing users to search by year and country.
Illustrations
In addition to the newly developed resources page, our team at Univers Labs redesigned a range of resources for The Lancet Countdown, refreshing policy briefing templates and developing a range of illustrations to be used within their marketing efforts.
“Our partnership with The Lancet Countdown has enabled Univers Labs to work on an ambitious web platform to coincide with the launch of their annual report. This project required content across a range of digital media types, calling on many different skills from our talented team, including video production, musical composition, and illustration to communicate the work of The Lancet Countdown in a number of ways that speaks to a wider audience”. — Max von Seibold, Head of Production.
This project launched on Wednesday 13th of November, in time for The Lancet Countdown’s annual report on climate change and human health, which has received excellent worldwide media coverage and recognition. Full case study coming to our website soon.
