We transformed Water Grows from a static online presence into an authoritative, community-powered platform that turns Texas’s most urgent resource crisis into a call to action farmers actually answer.
We delivered a complete brand overhaul, custom-designed and developed website, and a first-of-its-kind Water Challenge community forum, all built to perform on the rural mobile connections that Texas farmers depend on. From animated data storytelling to county-level engagement tools, every element was engineered to make water conservation impossible to ignore.
Texas is running out of water. Sixty percent of the state’s water supply comes from groundwater, and aquifer levels are dropping faster than they can recharge, leaving a 6.9 million acre-feet deficit that threatens the livelihoods of farmers across every region. The numbers are alarming. The trajectory is worse. And the people who need to act, the farmers managing millions of acres, had almost no digital infrastructure connecting them to the crisis or to each other.
Water Grows, a partnership between Texas Corn Producers and USDA NRCS since 2009, had spent over a decade championing conservation on the ground. But their digital presence told a different story. The existing site failed to communicate the scale or urgency of the water crisis. There were no interactive tools, no community features, no way for a farmer in the Panhandle to share what was working with a producer in the Rio Grande Valley. Critical data, aquifer depletion rates, population growth projections, regional water stress maps, sat buried or absent entirely.
The brief was clear but demanding: build a platform that matches the urgency of the mission. One that turns complex hydrological data into stories farmers actually absorb. One that creates peer-to-peer dialogue in a community that traditionally relies on word of mouth. And one that loads fast on a 3G connection in rural West Texas, because that is where the people who matter most are trying to access it.
We treated this as a ground-up transformation, not a redesign, but a rethinking of how a conservation organization communicates, engages, and mobilizes online. We started in Figma, building a design system rooted in the tension between urgency and trust: bold enough to convey crisis, authoritative enough to earn credibility with agricultural professionals. From there, we moved into custom development, engineering every animation, data visualization, and interactive feature to serve a single purpose, getting farmers to care, connect, and act. The entire build was delivered in two months, with brand, design, development, community tools, and SEO shipping as one cohesive system.
We built a complete design system in Figma anchored by a teal and dark navy palette that evokes water and earth without sentimentality. Inter Tight for headings, Inter for body, clean, modern typography that signals credibility to both agricultural professionals and policy stakeholders.
Custom-built from the ground up with scroll-triggered GSAP animations, water droplet fill effects, drain visualizations, and parallax scrolling, all engineered to make data visceral. Fully responsive, optimized for low-bandwidth rural connections.
A custom community platform with topic creation, threaded discussions, upvote-based voting, tag filtering, and county-level engagement. Designed to give farmers a structured space to share conservation challenges and solutions with peers across Texas.
Technical SEO built into the architecture from day one, with optimized metadata, semantic markup, and compressed assets. Performance-tuned for rural mobile, because a site that doesn't load in Lubbock doesn't serve its mission.
We’ve spent years doing this work in the field, but we never had a digital platform that could carry the same weight. Now when a farmer visits the site, they see the data, they feel the urgency, and they have a place to actually talk to other producers about what they’re facing. The Water Challenge forum alone has changed how we think about community engagement.
A community-driven conservation platform that gives Texas farmers the tools and data to protect their water future.
Water Grows now operates from a digital home that matches the gravity of its mission. The redesigned brand and animated data visualizations position the organization as the definitive voice on agricultural water conservation in Texas.
The Water Challenge forum created something that didn't exist before: a structured, searchable space where Texas farmers exchange conservation strategies, surface local challenges by county, and vote up the solutions that work.
Scroll-triggered animations and data storytelling make the 6.9 million acre-feet deficit hit harder than any PDF report. Optimized load times ensure the site performs where it matters, on mobile, in rural Texas.
