You Might Not Need a Ground-Up Website Redesign
Whether due to budget contraints, timing, or organizational readiness, sometimes that full website overhaul you want just isn't in the cards. Thankfully, there’s an alternative: iterative, impactful improvement to an existing site. This option is overlooked because the perception is that it’s...
The Complete Guide to Large Website Menu Design
Do you have hundreds of pages of content that need to be organized into a coherent navigation structure? Here, we share navigation design best practices and insights for menu design on large, content-rich websites. Use of the “Hamburger” Menu When the hamburger menu first showed up as a common user...
How COVID-19 Is Changing Decision-Making for Students — and How Colleges Can Adapt
The coronavirus has touched nearly every facet of the way Americans live, learn, work, and interact. The higher education community, in particular, has felt its effects acutely. As we approach May 1st, the day traditionally known as National College Decision Day, prospective students who are...
Storytelling Through Content-First Design
Beautifully designed websites are a delight to look at, but if the site’s content is incongruous to its aesthetic, the website hasn’t served its main function. To translate information into meaning quickly and easily for the user, the design should be built with content strategy as the guiding...
Strategy and Foresight: Finding Common Ground Between Chess and Design Systems
I was introduced to chess at a young age and have been a fan ever since. One of the best ways to learn chess when you're just getting started is to analyze the games of masters, to see how they approached a given situation. When doing so, you quickly learn that chess is a game of strategy, but that...
How to Choose a UI Color Palette
As a designer whose work spans advertising, illustration, user experience, and digital systems, I find that universal design principles generally hold true across mediums. Things like hierarchy, white space, and typography are applicable in more or less similar ways from printed page to screen...
Creating Better User Experiences Through Everyday Inspiration
There’s an expression in French for a specific cognitive bias: deformation professionelle . This is the bias that leads a person to see the world through the lens of their profession rather than from the perspective of a regular human. In my case, as a UX Design Strategist, it leads me to be more...
Accessibility in Web Design
As a web designer, I know that most clients want their website to be engaging, forward-thinking, and usable. But the surface-level concept of usability often leaves many people out of the equation. Access to the Internet — now seen as a fundamental human right — is only accomplished if websites...
Choosing the Right Image: A Design Blog for Content Managers
When designing a website, sometimes content isn't immediately available to work with. In this instance, two things are needed: placeholder copy and placeholder photos. Placeholder copy is typically fairly straightforward, but choosing placeholder photos can sometimes be a challenge. The goal is to...
Digital First — Rethinking the College Viewbook
Over the years, we have worked with many colleges and universities on a wide array of marketing materials, and we have found one common denominator when it comes to traditional student viewbooks: They tend to look and sound the same. The formulaic approach that so many colleges take to this printed...
- 1 of 2
- next ›