Ohio’s new brand on more than 60 State websites: one look Ohioans can recognize

On May 10, 2023, the Governor brought back “Ohio, The Heart of it All”, the State’s tourism slogan from 1984 to 2001, with a new logo by the Columbus agency Ron Foth Advertising, as “a brand for all of Ohio” (State of Ohio, May 10, 2023). That summer the Department of Administrative Services, with the Governor’s Office and the Department of Development, set out to carry it onto the State’s websites, so that Ohioans would find one consistent State wherever they landed and could recognize it and connect with it (DAS, August 2023).

For the people who use them, the State is many websites: Ohio.gov, then Medicaid, the EPA, Natural Resources, a licensing board. Each of those sites had its own agency, its own owner and authors, and its own logo and colors. The new brand had to reach more than 60 of them in a few months, and each agency had to see and approve its new look, without anything else on its site changing.

And a brand made for billboards and print does not drop straight onto a screen. Of the eight secondary colors in the State’s May 2023 brand guide, only one reaches the 4.5:1 contrast WCAG AA asks of body text on white, and the guide itself rules out pairing its red and its blue. The State’s websites had to meet Section 508 in their new colors too.

One palette, proven on two sites first

In November 2023 we defined a global color palette from the brand’s colors with the InnovateOhio Platform team, and proved it first on Ohio.gov and myOhio before any agency site changed. The platform already let each agency start from a red, green or blue base style; the new palette kept that logic, with each site’s own stylesheet refined on top.

A platform change, not 60 redesigns

The sites in scope run on one platform and share about 20 global authoring and presentation templates (per the State, 2023). So the rebrand lived in each site’s logo and stylesheet, not in its pages: layouts, content and functionality stayed as they were, and we built a global component for switching a site’s stylesheet and logo. Publishing a site’s new design is a syndication on the platform, so any number of sites could go live in the same weekly change window.

A mockup and an approval for every site

Every site got a mockup of its home page, a section landing page and sample pages, drawn in UXPin or applied to the live site in the browser and captured, for its owner and the platform team to approve. We then made the changes in authoring, the site owner checked them in staging, and the site went to production in the Wednesday change window. The sites were worked in seven groups prioritized with the platform team, and every agency in the project heard each week which sites had gone live.

Brand colors that stay readable

The style changes were held to Section 508 and tested for accessibility, including with the JAWS screen reader. Where a color failed WCAG contrast in review, it was replaced: a brown header on the Department of Transportation’s site became Buckeye Blue, hover states left in the old blue took the new one, and red buttons on blue backgrounds, which the brand guide rules out, were restyled.

Between November 2023 and January 2024, more than 60 State websites went live with the new brand, group by group: Ohio.gov and myOhio, departments such as the EPA, Health, Medicaid, Commerce, Transportation and Natural Resources, programs such as DriveOhio, and boards such as the State Medical Board and the Board of Nursing. The project closed with its final summary in January 2024, and we fixed what came up after go-live through February.

In September 2026, agency sites such as das.ohio.gov still carry the agency logo and palette of the State brand, and sites that have since moved to the platform’s next technology, such as the Rail Development Commission and DriveOhio, kept the same brand.

The brand is the State’s. Our part, working directly for the Department of Administrative Services, was carrying it across the platform we had helped build since 2017, a story we tell in our InnovateOhio case study.