Industry: Government
Almost Always is a creative agency that designs brands and digital experiences for cities and public agencies that serve everyone, not just the digitally fluent. We help government teams make public services feel public: clear, accessible, and worth trusting.
Trust in government isn’t won with a press release. It’s what residents feel when they need something — a permit, an event, an answer — and either find it or give up. The best civic experiences don’t just inform. They serve. Most don’t get there. Not because the staff doesn’t care, but because the design was never the priority.
Almost always, someone arrives at a government site mid-task. Paying a fee, finding a date, reporting a problem. Most organizations get to choose their audience. Government serves everyone. Every age, every language, every level of patience.
Residents won’t praise a form that works, but they’ll remember the one that didn’t. Great civic UX moves people through tasks so cleanly the city seems to simply work. The event page that’s three clicks too deep is a no-show. The PDF-only application is a phone call your staff has to answer. These aren’t IT tickets. They’re the job.
A decades-old seal shrunk into a favicon. Clip-art flyers for a world-class event. A website that looks older than the people using it. Residents notice. Somewhere in their lizard brain, it reads as: this is going to be a hassle. Looking outdated in this category costs trust, and participation.
We don’t start with moodboards. We start with what residents come to do, where they abandon, and what accessibility actually requires. Strategy comes out of that. Design comes out of the strategy. The goal is always the same: public services that feel designed for the public.
There’s no template for this. The judgment calls — what to surface, what to simplify, how to serve a first-time visitor and a daily user on the same page — that’s the work. Anyone can reskin a city site. The judgment about what makes it serve is what you’re actually hiring for. If you want a team that owns that, we should talk.
Brand identity designed to own a position in the category, not disappear into it.
Websites, apps, and digital experiences that do the hard work so the user doesn’t have to.
Built custom, accessible, and shipped on the tech stack that doesn't break when it matters.
UX/UI product design, website design, marketing and sales collateral for an employee benefits platform for government contractors.
Numerous website design projects and digital advertising at the epicenter of culture in Los Angeles.
Design to make municipalities stand out
Most government websites were built for compliance, not comprehension. We work with government leaders and in-house teams to create brands and digital experiences that reflect the culture of the places and services behind them.
The founders in El Segundo. Senior-level creative and design experts on every project. The work that requires judgment is the work that requires people. So the people who make the calls are the ones in the room.
CEO, Co-Founder
Creative Director, Co-Founder
Government work is where design serves everyone, not a target demographic, not a paying customer, but a whole community. There's a weight to that mandate that keeps the work honest. You can't optimize for conversion when the user is a 70-year-old trying to renew a permit and a 25-year-old filing a claim and a non-English speaker navigating a benefits portal. Getting it right for all three is harder than almost anything we do for private sector clients. That difficulty is part of what we love about it.
Government design has a constraint that no private sector project has: the audience is everyone. You can't design for a target demographic when the product has to work for a 70-year-old who's never used a smartphone, a non-English speaker navigating a permit process, and a city council member reviewing a budget proposal simultaneously. That forces a level of clarity and accessibility that most brand work never has to achieve. At the same time, civic brands carry a different kind of trust weight. A confusing government website isn't just a bad user experience. It's a message about whether the institution respects the people it serves. The stakes are accountability, not conversion.
A new administration or incoming leadership is the most common: new priorities, new tone, and often an existing digital infrastructure that reflects none of it. The second is a community trust gap. When residents have disengaged or the organization has gone through something difficult and the brand needs to signal change. The third is a functionality fail: the permit portal goes down during a deadline, the event site crashes on Pride weekend, and the 311 app hasn't worked properly in two years. Those moments make it undeniable that the experience needs work, not just the visual identity.
They scope for compliance instead of experience. The accessibility checklist gets completed, the brand guidelines get approved, and the website launches on time but residents still can't figure out how to pay a parking ticket or find out when their trash gets picked up. Checking the boxes and serving the public are not the same thing. The second mistake is treating design as a communications problem rather than a service problem. Civic brands often invest in visual identity and messaging while leaving the actual digital service (the form, the portal, the app) looking and working like it was built in 2009. Residents form their opinion of a city or agency through the touchpoints they actually use, not the ones that were designed for a press release.
If we're not a good fit to help, we'll say so. And point you to who is.
