Post-event redesign transforming a pre-event logistics site into a permanent public archive — 18 recorded panels, 46 cross-linked participants, and a focal hierarchy rebuilt around video as the primary entry point for a historical audience arriving months or years after the fact.
Year
2019
Panels archived
18 panels · 46 cross-linked participants
Scope
Full site redesign — pre-event → permanent archive
Via
Deytah
Operational Impact
The Summit archive made 18 panels featuring some of the most significant civil rights voices of the last generation permanently accessible and navigable. Built to be maintained without ongoing developer involvement — the client is still managing it years later.
The LBJ Foundation supports the LBJ Presidential Library and the LBJ School of Public Affairs at UT Austin. Their institutional mandate is preservation — keeping things, accurately, forever.
The Summit on Race in America had already occurred — three days, 46 participants, 18 recorded panels — when the Foundation needed a website that matched what the event had become: a permanent record.
The original site was built for a future event. It had a speaker lineup, a schedule, registration logistics — everything a pre-event site needs. That version was no longer useful. The people arriving now weren't planning to attend. They were arriving to watch Dolores Huerta and Andrew Young in conversation, or to find what Madeleine Albright said about democracy, or to understand what happened at a summit they'd heard about.
The pre-event site wasn't wrong — it was right for its moment. The moment had changed.
The redesign involved four distinct operations:
Focal hierarchy. Video moved to the primary entry point. The speaker lineup and schedule — correct before April 8, noise after it — came out. What remained was the record of what actually happened.
Panel grid. Eighteen panels, each with its own page: video, session description, participant list, and photography. Organized for someone navigating by topic, by speaker, or by day.
Participant cross-linking. Forty-six participants, each linked to their profile page and to every panel they appeared in. Someone looking for one speaker can find everything they said across the three days.
Removal. The hardest editorial decision on any post-event site is what to delete. Registration links, logistics, future-tense language — all of it signals to the visitor that they're in the wrong time. Taking it out is what makes the archive feel like an archive.
Notable participants: Dolores Huerta · Andrew Young · Madeleine Albright · Valerie Jarrett · DeRay Mckesson · Luci Baines Johnson · Lynda Johnson Robb · Dulcé Sloan · Wyclef Jean
A website has a lifecycle. The Summit site needed to be two different things at two different times — a pre-event information system and a post-event archive — and the transition between those two states required deliberate redesign, not just content updates.
Knowing which information belongs to which moment, and removing what no longer serves the visitor, is as important as knowing what to add. Good information architecture isn't only about structure. It's about time.