The Defense Forensics & Biometrics Agency

The DFBA Mission

DFBA leads, consolidates and coordinates forensics and biometrics activities and operations for the Department of Defense in support of identity operations.

ClientDFBA

CategoryIdentity + Branding
Web Design + Development
Print / Digital

Year2017

Project Information

The Defense Forensics & Biometrics Agency is an organization that not many people have heard of, but one that enables a lot of amazing things to happen in the realm of the governmental and military application of forensics and biometrics technology in battle and in day-to-day life. A mouthful.

Simply put: They enable cool stuff.

Branding + Identity

The DFBA brand was outdated and focused on protecting a nation at war. The US Army’s Institute of Heraldry designed a seal that solidified the overall mission- to deny the enemy anonymity, but it was rarely used. Instead of redesigning a logo to coexist with the seal, we decided to build the brand around it. We thought a wordmark would work best, as it would allow the seal to take center stage, as well as be flexible and versatile enough to be modified for DFBA’s various divisions. Some elements from the existing brand were repurposed in the new brand, like the fingerprint, which became the brand’s motif to provide a link from the past to the present.

Web Design + Development

We wanted to redesign the existing DFBA website as a responsive web presence that would be cleaner, clearer, more concise, and of course, in line with the new brand. As DFBA isn’t extremely well known, the organization’s overview video needed to be prominent on the homepage to inform visitors just who DFBA is and of its mission. We incorporated various tools to keep an otherwise static site a bit more engaging, like an Upcoming Industry Events page that pulls events from the organization’s Google Calendar. Built from the ground up with HTML5 and CSS3, the new, fully responsive, 508 Compliant DFBA website solidifies the new brand and showcases a reinvigorated agency, ready to continue its work in a new age.

Visit DFBA

The Challenge

The agency’s organization was restructured in the middle of developing, creating issues in transferring content, but it was the need to ensure HTML5 and CSS3 web browser compatibility with Internet Explorer that proved to be the biggest challenge. Policy regarding government websites requires compatibility across all major web browsers, with no preferential messages for a modern web browser over another. No cop outs.

Surprisingly, ensuring accessibility and Section 508 compliance, a government policy regarding accessibility, wasn’t extremely difficult, just a bit tedious. But everyone deserves to enjoy the web.

Without direct access to the server, a CMS platform would have caused too many complications to build and maintain in the long run, so I opted for HTML5 and CSS3.