Five Digital Properties for One of America's Leading Environmental Organizations
EDF runs dozens of programs and, over years, built a constellation of digital properties around them — each with its own audience, content model, and technology stack. Keeping that ecosystem coherent, accessible, and maintainable without slowing the science down was the through-line.
What started in 2022 as a Vital Signs magazine build grew into a multi-year, multi-property partnership — a flagship edf.org redesign, the MethaneSAT global satellite-data platform, a Climate Smart Agriculture web app, and a blog redesign — each building on a shared modular component system so the EDF team can keep editing, expanding, and shipping without us in the loop for every change.
Five distinct digital properties now share a coherent foundation, a stable Drupal stack, and accessibility-first patterns the EDF team can extend as new programs emerge. The partnership has compounded — each new property benefits from what came before.
The Environmental Defense Fund operates dozens of programs — methane tracking from orbit, climate-smart agriculture, regional policy work — and over years has built a constellation of digital properties around them. Since 2022 we’ve partnered with EDF across five of those properties, applying a single principle every time: build it modular, hand them the keys, make sure they can keep going without us.
It started with Vital Signs
Our first engagement with EDF was Vital Signs — a digital magazine to tell EDF’s stories beyond the institutional voice of the main site. We designed and built it as a modular component system in Drupal, with reusable patterns the editorial team could rearrange without engineering support every time they wanted to ship a new story.
The component-based approach worked. It became the blueprint everything else in this partnership would build on.
edf.org — the flagship
Soon after Vital Signs shipped, EDF asked us to take on the flagship — edf.org itself. A multi-stakeholder, multi-program site with the breadth of EDF’s work to communicate and a content team that had outgrown its previous template-driven CMS.
We started with Discovery, took it through Redesign and Build across 2022–2023, and have continued as the team’s Drupal support partner ever since — through 2025’s Support, Maintenance & Enhancements work and into 2026 enhancement support. The same modular philosophy from Vital Signs anchored the rebuild: components the EDF team configures themselves, not a stack of hard-coded pages.
MethaneSAT — a global satellite-data platform built on the Vital Signs blueprint
MethaneSAT is EDF’s mission to track methane emissions worldwide from orbit and put that data in the hands of the public, researchers, and academic institutions. They came to us needing a website that could grow with the satellite — new data, new tools, new visualizations — without becoming a maintenance burden.
We began with a comprehensive content and UX audit of the existing site, flagging usability and accessibility issues, particularly on mobile and screen readers. Then we rebuilt the site on Drupal using a modular component system explicitly modeled on Vital Signs — thirteen components with multiple color variations so the platform reads dynamically rather than templated. A tagging system replaced repetitive manual entry so personnel data lives once and updates everywhere.
For highly stylized pages like “Our Mission,” we kept the existing animations and custom design while making subtle adjustments for accessibility and mobile. A secondary color palette delineates content types so users can navigate by purpose, and we documented when to apply it so new content stays on-brand. We also made interactivity legible — clear arrows, consistent patterns, hover states — instead of relying on visitors to guess where clickable elements lived.
The result is a platform that scales with the satellite and a content team that can ship without filing a development ticket every time.
Climate Smart Agriculture, and a blog redesign
Alongside the three big properties, the partnership grew into two more. A Climate Smart Agriculture web application — a dedicated utility built into the broader Drupal stack — and a blog redesign that takes the modular-component pattern from Vital Signs and MethaneSAT and applies it to long-form publishing.
Each of these inherited the same component vocabulary the EDF team had already learned, so the lift to adopt them was smaller every time.
The through-line
What ties the five properties together isn’t a single technology — it’s a shared editorial system. Modular components, configured by the EDF team, supported by a partner who’s been holding the same Drupal stack since 2022. Every new property builds on what came before, which is why the work has compounded instead of branched.
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