Designed in collaboration with Alex Braidwood and Eric "Oz" Andren.
We were approached to design a new website for the Iowa State University College of Design, and our team proposed a change in culture instead of just a new website design. We proposed to design a website tailor-made for the way that the Iowa State University College of Design marketing team works instead of creating a site based on ideas that their team had for the new design. We interviewed their team and several other stakeholders at intake meetings to discuss their desires for the new site. We inquired about the workflow for producing stories and marketing pieces. Desires did not line up with the workflow. For instance, people requested large images of student and faculty work, but they had a hard time obtaining large images. They also wanted the website to look fresh every time a user visited, but the marketing team does not produce content at the frequency that would require. Additionally, most people wanted navigation that was intuitive, but wanted to keep the navigation they had.
Given this dichotomy between desires and reality, we designed a site that caters to their design needs by working well for the way that they function. First, we tackled navigation by identifying potential audiences and made the audiences into navigation. Next, we created a system that requires publishers to attach audience categories to content, allowing content to be easily integrated into the navigation. Additionally, the layout is based on multiple images per page rather than singular large images, allowing the College’s marketing team to use the small images they typically receive, while also achieving all stakeholders’ goal of showing more work.
Process Work
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