Amplifying Mobility Justice Stories Across 14 Cities
lover studio
Amplifying Mobility Justice Stories Across 14 Cities
Project Summary
City Snapshots is a national storytelling project that sheds light on the enduring impacts of displacement, disconnection, and disinvestment in minoritized communities across the United States.
Developed in collaboration with lover studio, Equivolve, and 14 cities in the Equitably Reconnecting Communities initiative, it centers local, community-led efforts to address the harms of mobility injustice.
Blending digital story maps and archival imagery, the project honors the past while pointing toward more just, community-rooted futures.
Overview
lover studio led UX design, visual design, creative direction, and Framer development.
What We Did
• UX Design and Information Architecture
• Visual Design
• Content Strategy Across 14 City Stories
• Art / Creative Direction
• Custom Collage Art Direction and Integration
• Accessibility and Responsive Design
• Framer Development
Timeline: August 2024 - December 2024
Tools: Framer, Figma, Adobe Photoshop, Canva
Landing Page of City Snapshots
The Challenge
Make Complex Histories Easier To Understand
Each city carried layered histories shaped by displacement, infrastructure, and systemic inequity. The challenge was to communicate that complexity in a way that felt clear and digestible to a broad, public audience.
Create Consistency Across 14 Different Cities
The experience needed a shared structure and visual language, while still allowing each city’s story to feel specific to its community and local context.
Design With Care
Because the project addressed histories of harm, the tone needed to feel thoughtful and grounded without becoming overwhelming. The design had to support reflection and learning.
Early Narrative Drafts to Guide the Site’s Information Architecture
Information Architecture
We structured the platform to support exploration and cross-city learning.
Each city page includes:
Local Context
Mobility Legacies Framework
Solutions and Initiatives
Archival Imagery and Collages
Collage Examples
Mobility Legacies Framework
We introduced five guiding themes:
• Forced Migrations
• Industrialization and Uneven Economic Mobility
• Urban Renewal and Disruption
• Ecological and Environmental Impacts
• Public Safety
These provided a shared language across the website while allowing each city’s story to remain grounded in its own context.
Our Solution
Narrative-Led City Pages
Each city page was designed as a guided story, bringing together history, policy, imagery, and community action in a clear, scrollable format.
Shared Structure Across 14 Cities
We created a consistent visual framework that made the site easier to navigate while allowing each city’s story to retain its own voice and context.
Theme-Based Navigation
Visitors can explore stories by city or through shared mobility themes, making it easier to identify patterns across places and connect local histories to broader systems.
City Page Flow
Impact
City Snapshots turned a large body of place-based research and storytelling into a clear, accessible experience that teams can easily share and use.
Early feedback praised the site’s visual clarity, ease of navigation, and overall presentation. Partners also noted that the digital format helped strengthen and elevate the stories themselves, making them more useful for participating teams to share with stakeholders and communities.
The website looks incredible and is really easy to navigate. It also feels incredibly useful for teams because the stories are presented so well.
Equivolve Partner, St. Louis
Let’s Collaborate
lover studio partners with mission-driven nonprofits and organizations to design thoughtful, accessible digital experiences.
We specialize in UX research and design, Framer web design and development, multilingual content strategy, and narrative-driven platforms.
Like this project
Posted Mar 30, 2026
Designing a mobility justice storytelling experience across 14 cities to make complex histories clearer, more navigable, and easier to engage.
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Timeline
Aug 1, 2024 - Dec 1, 2024
