TransLash Media

TransLash Media began when Imara Jones, an award-winning Black trans journalist, decided to push back against the anti-trans rhetoric of the Trump administration by touring the country and sharing her personal stories.

By 2023, Imara and her team of journalists and media makers had grown TransLash into the leading source for trusted information on the trans experience in the United States. But despite their growing influence, their digital presence didn’t yet reflect the vibrancy, impact, and rising reputation of their work.

They came to Briteweb for support with developing a dynamic new brand and digital experience—one that would truly embody the spirit of their community and help elevate their profile from grassroots journalism to a reputable media company.

As the organization grew, it needed a more cohesive organizational voice, a strong brand to carry that voice forward, and a fully reimagined web experience to showcase and organize TransLash’s extensive, award-winning media library.

We kicked off our work with a series of in-depth workshops, diving into the organization’s history and their hopes for the future. During these collaborative sessions, we made friends, defined needs, identified opportunities, and developed the frameworks for our brand and digital strategies.

The TransLash team came to the table with a strong sense of who they are and why their work matters. Our task was to listen deeply to what already resonated, and surface additional insights to establish a strong set of pillars to guide our verbal and visual brand development.

Their tagline: “We tell trans stories to save trans lives,” stayed at the heart of our work. We understood that the safety and freedom of the trans community was under threat against the backdrop of mounting anti-LGBTQ+ legislation. The urgency and importance of this work was clear, and helped forge an environment of mutual trust, accountability, and open communication that strengthened our work.

Our brand strategy process articulated key conceptual pieces that would help TransLash carve out a space in the field that felt uniquely theirs. We expanded those ideas into external brand messaging, bringing in outside audiences with engaging language and a compelling vision for the future.

We began our visual identity work by reviewing TransLash’s existing brand to find elements to retain and refresh. Their signature orange hue and use of expressive colours and vivid imagery were carried forward so that their new brand would feel familiar to longtime followers. Each element in their new identity system—from colour swatches to typographic hierarchy—was improved to enhance clarity, increase contrast, and achieve accessibility standards.

In addition to being bold and accessible, the visual system was designed as a wayfinding tool to help guide users through the reorganization of TransLash’s massive content library. We built a strategy to codify and communicate what people could expect to find in various categories, mapping color choices to specific media types, and providing graphic throughlines to help users follow the stories that matter to them.

Our web content and user experience grew directly from the same strategy that guided the identity design: making it easier for more people to find, engage with, and share trans stories (to save lives).



We leaned heavily on the new TransLash brand’s visual and verbal language, allowing it to shape a cohesive and consistent look and feel for the site. Bold visual elements mirrored the organization’s personality, while colour-coding helped visitors quickly find the media they needed. Clever design touches and interactions made the user experience feel novel and unique, elevating beyond straightforward navigation.

We supported TransLash’s development of a unique interactive tool that provides a critical service for trans people and everyone who loves them: the TransLash Legislation Dashboard. This dashboard gathers data across various sources to provide up-to-date information on the alarming increase of anti-trans legislation in the United States. 

With this much-needed information on the laws that hold the trans community back, the dashboard helps people identify ways in which they can challenge bigotry and build a better future for everyone.

To be prepared for TransLash’s projected growth in the coming years, we focused on building flexible content modules designed to support a wide-range of customization to meet their unknown future needs, and projected a future sitemap for them, showing ways to scale the current site when new projects or opportunities arise. Our hope was to set their team up for success today and for many years to come.

Overall, the key ingredient in this project was building trust. We worked very closely with the TransLash team, learning through honest feedback and powerful conversations about how best to meet their community’s needs. Over time, our reciprocal generosity and openness created a client relationship that one of our developers describes as “quite magical.” 



Today, we count ourselves among TransLash’s biggest fans, with a shared gratitude for their work that goes far beyond a client-agency connection.