AT&T's Dream in Black campaign centered on a flagship anthology film celebrating Black voices and stories. But a campaign film broadcast at viewers is fundamentally different from a campaign that invites participation. The brief evolved to include two interconnected platforms: a responsive landing page anchored by the film, and a user-generated content hub where the audience could contribute their own family stories, ancestral photos, and personal histories. The vision was a living digital archive — a space where the campaign's message extended beyond AT&T and into the community.
The UGC platform introduced significant technical and moderation challenges. User-uploaded photos and narratives needed API-based automated moderation to maintain content quality and brand safety at scale. The platform also needed to handle the emotional weight of the content it was hosting — family legacies, ancestral photos, personal histories. Every interface decision had to honor that gravity rather than treat user submissions as form-fill data.
I led the design of both platform components as a unified ecosystem. The campaign film page served as the brand anchor, presenting AT&T's editorial vision with a cinematic, responsive layout. The UGC hub was architecturally distinct but visually cohesive — users moved between them seamlessly. I defined the content taxonomy for the UGC platform: family stories, ancestral media uploads, narrative creation, and community display.
The family legacy submission flow required particular sensitivity in its design. Users were being asked to share deeply personal content — photos of ancestors, family histories, stories of identity. I designed the submission experience to feel like a digital archive, not a social media upload. Clear category guidance, emotional copy, and an honest explanation of how the content would be used built the trust needed for users to share.
With user-submitted content at scale, manual moderation wasn't viable. I worked with the development team to integrate API-based automated moderation that reviewed submissions against content policies before they went live. I designed the moderation states into the UX: pending review, approved, and edge-case flagging with human review queues. Users received clear feedback at each stage.
Like the Rising Future Makers platform, this campaign needed to reach its audience where they actually were — mobile. I designed the film viewing experience with full-screen mobile video in mind, and the UGC submission for thumb-friendly photo upload from the camera roll. The desktop experience extended into a richer gallery format for the family archive.
The temptation was to design the UGC hub as a social feed — infinite scroll, likes, sharing. I pushed back. The content users were contributing deserved archival permanence, not social media ephemerality. The design language borrowed from editorial archives: organized, reverent, permanent-feeling. This framing encouraged higher-quality submissions and aligned with the campaign's emotional register.
Rather than making the film and UGC feel like separate features, I connected them narratively: the film shows AT&T's vision, the UGC hub invites the audience to add their own story to it. This framing — from broadcast to conversation — made participation feel meaningful rather than tokenistic.
UGC platforms fail when users don't trust them. I designed explicit, honest communication into every step of the submission flow: what AT&T will do with the content, who will see it, and how long it will be displayed. This transparency was non-negotiable for a campaign asking people to share family photos and personal narratives.
The Dream in Black platform launched as the digital centerpiece of AT&T's campaign, receiving user-generated family stories and archiving community narratives alongside the flagship film. The platform provided AT&T and Translation with a scalable, moderated UGC system that honored the campaign's cultural significance.
This project reinforced that UGC design is fundamentally about trust architecture. The submission flow, moderation system, and content display all needed to communicate: your story is safe here, and it matters. Getting that right required thinking beyond the UI and into the systems and policies that backed every design decision.