Case study
Nine institutions and two free books, made one navigable system
A global governance framework spanning nine separate institutions, given away in two free books. We built the public platform that makes the whole of it navigable from a standing start.
The challenge
Nine institutions, a whole framework — and nothing to sell
Commons World is not one organisation. It is nine — Planetary Coherence & Health, the Commons Registry, the Alliance for Transparent Enterprise and six more, each with its own remit and its own domain — held together by a single framework published in two free books. A visitor arriving cold has to grasp that it is one system, decide it is serious, and find their way in, without a product, a price or a transaction anywhere to orient them.
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Scale of the idea
Nine institutions, each on its own domain, had to read as one architecture rather than nine unrelated projects.
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No transaction
Nothing is sold. The only thing a visitor can be asked to do is read — so the whole site has to earn that.
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Credibility on sight
An unfamiliar governance framework has to be taken seriously in the first screen or not at all.
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Different visitors
Readers, partners and supporters arrive with different questions and need different first steps.
The approach
We built the platform around one job — get a stranger to the books — and organised everything behind it into three doors: understand it, read it, take part
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Website
Three doors, one system
Understand, Read, Take part. Every page in the site resolves into one of the three, in the navigation and again in the footer.
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Brand
Made it read institutional
An editorial design system — a serif display against a sans text face, navy, cream and gold — carrying authority across every page.
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SEO
Described it to machines
A structured-data graph naming the organisation, its founder, the site and the framework's own vocabulary, so the model is legible to search as well as to readers.
The work
Nine institutions, laid out as one architecture
The nine are given a single page position, a fixed card shape and one consistent line each — a name, a job, and a way in — so the whole framework can be taken in at a glance before any of it is read in depth.
The results
Live, and carrying the whole framework
Commons World is published: nine institutions presented as one architecture, two books free to anyone who wants them, and a single path in that every page leads back to.
Qualitative build outcomes from a website, design-system and technical-SEO delivery. No performance figures are claimed.
In their words
Simon has been an absolute pleasure to work with. What I appreciated most was his patience and willingness to slow things down and work at my pace, while always remaining committed to seeing the project through to completion. He took my ideas seriously, understood what I was trying to create with Commons World, and stayed with it until the job was finished — I’m genuinely grateful for that.