Nourishing Minds

Nourishing Minds is a mental wellness program for teens, created by The Seattle Public Library. Librarians run sessions where teens work through creative design challenges together, and those challenges open up honest conversations about mental health. After piloting the program in a handful of libraries, the team wanted to offer it to libraries across the country.

We built nourishing-minds.org to do that: explain the program, give librarians everything they need to run it, and speak directly to teens. It was our second project for the library, after a teen mental health website in 2021.

The site had two audiences. Librarians needed to understand the program's framework and trust that they could run it without clinical training, then get the cookbook, card deck, placemat and session plans that make it work. Teens needed a corner of the site that felt like it was made for them.

The program already had a bright, illustrated identity, and the client wanted the site to move: animated illustrations, parallax color shapes and playful hover states. All of that had to stay fast and work on phones and tablets. Later, the library secured 100 printed toolkits to give away, one per library, and needed a way to take those orders and get them to the printer.

Content planned page by page

We started with a sitemap and a shared content document that held the copy for every page, with notes on what each section would show. The site is organized around how a librarian learns the program: why it exists and the framework behind it, the program essentials (getting started, cards and categories, recipes and placemat, session planning, downloads), then resources, a FAQ and the program's history and team.

Built in WordPress, editable by the library

We built every page in WordPress with Elementor for desktop and mobile, refined through rounds of client feedback, so the library's team can edit the site themselves. A mega menu with a full sitemap tab and breadcrumb trails keep the deeper program pages easy to find.

Illustration that moves

On the home page, a layer of leaves and flowers rises out of the illustrated teen's head as the page loads, a teal shape slides over the scene with a parallax effect, and the logo moves into the header as you scroll. The colored shapes behind the content on the inner pages move the same way. We tuned the animation speed and the scroll behavior with the client until they felt right, then checked each page on iOS and Android phones and tablets in Safari, Chrome and Edge.

A Teen Zone

A page written for teens rather than librarians, linked from the home page and the main menu, with its own video and a carousel of quotes from teens and librarians who took part.

The toolkit, free or printed

Any library can download the full toolkit (the cookbook, the card deck, the placemat and a quick guide) after a short form. For the printed giveaway we built a request form that limits orders to one per library and validates every required field. Each request sends a confirmation to the librarian and the full order details to the printer and the library, so the printer can ship without anyone forwarding emails. When the kits ran out, we switched the giveaway popup off without deleting it, so it can come back if the library funds another printing.

Launch and handoff

We ran the site on our staging server during the build, then moved it to the library's own Kinsta hosting and worked through a memory limit that blocked edits to the home page. We registered nourishing-minds.org on the library's behalf so launch was not held up, and later transferred the domain to them. We still help with hosting and DNS questions.

• A national home for the program, live at nourishing-minds.org since spring 2025.
• All 100 printed toolkits were claimed within days of the program's announcement in the American Library Association newsletter.
• Printed kit orders went straight from the site to the printer and the library, with a confirmation to every requester.
• An animated, illustrated site the library's team can edit themselves, tested on phones and tablets.