Website Redesign Proposal
Prepared for the Food is Medicine Institute | Tufts University | July 2026
Prepared for the Food is Medicine Institute | Tufts University | July 2026
Dear Julia and the FIMI Selection Team,
We are honored to submit this proposal to design, develop, and launch the redesigned website for the Food is Medicine Institute. You are asking for a design thought partner who can help a first-of-its-kind academic institute speak clearly to the healthcare leaders and policymakers with the power to act on its evidence — and that is the project we have scoped, planned, and priced.
Our approach is defined by two commitments. The first is an evidence-based practice, meeting an evidence-based institute. You spend your careers replacing assumption with data; we build websites the same way — with eye-tracking studies, user-path mapping, and post-launch analytics in place of aesthetic guesswork. Our commitment: within two clicks, each of your primary audiences reaches the evidence, the examples, and the path to engage that Sections 3.1 and 3.2 of your RFP describe.
The second is being your most intentional partner. We do not act as an outside vendor; we integrate into your team. That includes traveling to Boston at our own cost for an in-person kickoff at 150 Harrison Avenue, coordinating day to day through Julia as your single point of contact, and building the Tufts brand-review loop into the schedule from week one rather than treating it as a surprise in November.
You will also find us unusually direct in this proposal — about Pantheon, about what a January launch requires from both teams, and about anything that turns out harder than it looks. We would rather tell you exactly what we deliver than write confident language around what we cannot.
We certify that we have carefully examined the RFP, studied the current site, the Rockefeller Foundation site, and the Tufts brand guidelines, and are confident in delivering the visually dynamic, credible platform the Institute deserves — on a January 2027 launch we assess as feasible, with risks named plainly.
We look forward to hearing from you,
A holistic philosophy that ensures our work delivers maximum impact and integrity — from first research to final launch.
We engage in continuous learning and creative-thinking exercises to build stamina and master our craft — so every project is delivered with peak efficiency and performance.
We embrace curiosity, empathy, and strategic questioning to ensure the final design resonates deeply and ethically with the user.
We apply rigorous, scalable, secure technical solutions — platforms that aren't only beautiful but are engineered for long-term compliance, staff maintainability, and security.
Being intellectual is not enough in a creative setting. Knowledge is being right, but wisdom is being right at the right time, in the right way, about the right thing.
Creativity takes vulnerability and curiosity. A fight to be right no matter the cost is corrupt business — no longer a creative endeavor. Good creativity is not about me, it is about us.
Having an idea is an insufficient end for the creative. The honest creative wrestles with ideas until the right idea proves itself. This is not easy work, but it is honest work.
The word empathy itself came into being for the sake of art. Without empathy — an insistent relationship with the audience — creativity becomes imbalanced self-indulgence.
Many treat creativity as a space to present an answer. The creative should be the one who has bigger questions than they have answers for — and invites others into that same questioning.
Creativity is about the relationship between creator and audience. Any unethical attempt to manipulate the audience or the truth is a failure of the creative — not art, but gas-lighting dressed up.
Given the August 2026 start date, we name the specific individuals below. This is the team that does the work — not a bench.
Mox is committed to keeping this core team intact through launch. Should a team member leave the company or become unavailable, we will immediately provide a replacement of equal or greater expertise at no disruption to the project timeline or budget, subject to the Institute's final approval.
You asked vendors to redesign one of your current project pages, and you told us why: they are text-heavy, academic-facing, and quiet about why the work matters. We chose the Medically Tailored Meal (MTM) Interventions page. It sits on some of your strongest evidence — a live Massachusetts Medicaid pilot with real utilization and cost outcomes — and today that evidence is presented as four nested academic aims and a raw journal citation. A health system executive skims it. A legislative staffer leaves.
What follows is a concept, not a finished design. Its job is to show you how we think about the problem. On the real engagement, this thinking is formalized in the design strategy document before any mockup exists.
Figures above are the Institute's own published findings — shown here the way the redesigned page would show them. Numbers stop being decoration and become the argument; the source link is what keeps them credible rather than promotional.
Academic pages are organized the way research is conducted: aims, methods, findings. Audience-facing pages have to be organized the way a decision gets made — what is the problem, does this work, what would it take, who do I call. The redesign reorders the same content around that sequence without removing anything a researcher needs.
A 49% reduction in hospital admissions is a remarkable finding presented today as a line of body text. Given scale, motion, and a source link, the same number carries its own weight. This is the discipline from our eye-tracking work: a statistic only persuades if the page is structured so it actually gets read.
A health system executive is evaluating feasibility and return. A legislative staffer is evaluating whether the evidence will hold up when it is challenged. Most sites make both audiences do that translation themselves. Doing it for them is inexpensive, and it is the single highest-leverage change on the page.
Everything in the people and related-work zones is generated from tagged relationships, not hand-curated. That is what makes the design sustainable for a non-technical team: your staff tag a publication once, and it appears on the project, on each author's profile, and in the filtered library automatically.
Tufts Blue leads and is reserved for large headings, consistent with the university's own accessibility guidance that it should not be used for body text. Secondary palette colors are used only to signal categories of information — one for healthcare-facing content, one for policy-facing content, one for peer-reviewed evidence — so color carries meaning rather than decoration. Every zone described above contains at least one visual element beyond text, per your Section 4.3, and the counters and scroll behavior respect reduced-motion preferences. We would apply this treatment as a repeatable template your team can fill for all 30 projects — not a one-off page.
We recommend WordPress, and the case is specific to you rather than generic to us. Your current site already runs WordPress on Pantheon — so this project is a redesign and a re-architecture, without a platform migration underneath it. On a January 2027 timeline, that is the difference between solving one hard problem and solving two.
Projects, team members, publications, resources, news, videos, and events each become a structured content type with defined fields — not free-form pages. Relationship fields link content in both directions, and templates query those relationships at render time. We extend the Project Type, Domain, Population, and Status vocabulary you already use rather than discarding it.
A dedicated search platform indexes every content type and document with weighted, configurable ranking, grouped by content type. Tags and filters let visitors move laterally without returning to the top nav, and persistent "For Healthcare Leaders" and "For Policymakers" pathways live in the mega-menu — the Rockefeller pattern you named. Delivered in writing at the close of discovery.
A program manager logs in, opens Publications, clicks Add New, pastes the citation, writes a two-sentence plain-language summary, tags the related project and team members, and hits Publish. It appears on the project page, on each tagged author's profile, and in the filtered library — automatically. Global styles are locked and user roles are scoped so no one can break a layout.
Built into design and code from the first mockup rather than audited in at the end, consistent with the standards at access.tufts.edu. Automated scanning runs against every template alongside manual screen-reader and keyboard-only testing, and we deliver a written conformance report. Training covers accessible publishing so conformance survives handoff.
Every primary template meets Google's "good" thresholds measured on throttled mobile, not just desktop: modern image formats with responsive sizing, deferred and minified scripts, video facades so YouTube and Vimeo embeds load as lightweight previews, and data visualizations that initialize on scroll. We capture a baseline in discovery so improvement is provable.
Programmatic for high-volume, consistently structured content: publications and news exported, transformed, and imported with tags mapped in bulk. Manual for high-value content that deserves editorial attention: projects, resources, and team profiles, where summaries are rewritten for your primary audiences rather than copied as-is. A complete redirect map preserves search equity through the hard cutover.
Mox has not deployed a site on Pantheon before. We will not pretend otherwise, and you should weigh it. Here is why we are confident it will not put your timeline at risk: Pantheon hosts standard WordPress — the platform we build on daily — and its dev, test, and live environment model is the same Git-based staging workflow we already use on every project.
We will follow Pantheon's published WordPress best practices, use Multidev environments for design-review staging, and coordinate with Tufts' Pantheon account administrators in the first two weeks of discovery. Any ramp-up time on Pantheon's tooling is ours to absorb — it is priced into our fixed fee, not into your schedule.
The schedule runs from contract execution in mid-August 2026 to a January 2027 launch, honoring your two-round revision process at each major milestone and treating the December holidays honestly rather than pretending they will not affect either team.
The schedule gives roughly five months of active work before the holidays, which is sufficient for this scope on WordPress with no platform migration underneath it. The conditions: feedback windows hold at seven business days; content retention decisions land in discovery rather than December; and brand sign-off happens at the gates. If any of the three slips by more than two weeks, the honest fallback is a late-January launch rather than a rushed cutover — and we will tell you early, not late.
What we need from you: brand assets, photo library, Pantheon and analytics access at kickoff; a decision pass on the content audit during discovery; consolidated feedback within seven business days at each design gate; university brand sign-off booked at the strategy and mockup gates; and a user-acceptance pass before launch. Student support on metadata and tagging alone can compress migration by as much as two weeks — the highest-leverage place to point it.
This proposal represents a fixed fee of $95,000 for the complete scope described in your RFP, itemized by phase with every deliverable your Section 7.8 asks to see broken out — taxonomy development, the design strategy document, video tutorials, and the post-launch support quarter each carry their own line.
Rates follow our standard card: $250/hr for strategy, research, creative direction, design, development, and pre-production; $150/hr for production design; $100/hr for meetings and project coordination. Milestone billing, invoiced electronically, Net 30: 25% at contract signing, 25% at formal approval of the Phase 2 designs, 25% at deployment of the staging site, 25% immediately following launch.
A $9,500 contingency reserve — 10% of the fixed fee — is held on top of the base amount and drawn only with your written approval, for scope that discovery legitimately changes: additional custom data visualizations, or migration volume beyond the counts in your Section 4.5. Total not-to-exceed authorization is $104,500. If the contingency is not needed, it is simply not spent. Hosting is provided by Tufts' Pantheon account, so no hosting fees appear here; premium plugins, if any prove necessary, are passed through at cost with zero agency markup. All travel to Boston is incurred by Mox — never passed to the Institute.
Because of our creative philosophy, ethical values, and collaborative approach, our roster has been able to work with these incredible organizations.
Our studio is in Boise, not Boston. That's the honest starting point — so here is what we know how to do from Boise: show up in person when it matters, run a communication rhythm so steady you stop noticing the distance, and rest every design decision on evidence, where geography has no vote. What we would be building isn't really a website. It's the place where a hospital executive decides food is medicine is worth piloting, and where a legislative staffer finds the citation that survives markup.
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