The Clemson University Brand Guide
About the project
Date:
Oct 9, 2024
Client:
Clemson Unversity Marketing and Communications
Services:
Design Systems UI/UX Design Market Research
Key Problems
Clemson is one of South Carolina's most recognizable brand and employs over 6000 faculty and staff across the state. Cohesive branding and communications across all of the many sub-organizations throughout the state can present a challenge without clear guidelines and resources for individual communicators.
Clemson University's existing brand guideline website hadn't been fully updated in nearly ten years.
The most recent guidelines on the 2020 brand refresh was currently primary distributed as a static pdf which lacked functional ease of use.
There was a difficulty in locating resources such as files for fonts, logos, and templated assets across their various different locations.
Brand guidelines were presented in multiple locations and pdf files that created challenges in keeping all content in sync with each other.
Things I Did
To tackle these problems the goal of this project was to create a single online resources that could be easily maintained and distributed to all of the university communicators, and share the ideals of the Clemson brand with the public.
The first steps in this process were to…
Assess the most commonly requested functional needs of stakeholders based on feedback and user interviews
Gather analytics data on what content is most popular on the current brand website
Research the visual design and structure of brand guideline sites from other organizations
Work with creative directors to establish a site structure and content plan
Develop Wireframes for page templates and a custom site navigation
Visual Design and Functional Components
After assessing the most common user needs and creating a framework for the site as a whole I began designing new interactive components that would help add an extra layer of functionality to this site as a resource. These included..
Tabular format information for brand colors with "click to copy" functionality for color values.
Visual examples of brand typefaces and all of their variants, with an area to test your own copy in each font.
An alphabetized and searchable glossary terms relevant to our writing style guidelines
An interactive spectrum that shows the breadth of examples of how branded elements can be applied thematically
Along with these I established an overall design system for this site denoting a typescale, button styles, column layout guide, do's and dont's, accordions, and other repeated elements.
The Development Process
I worked closely with our creative team and developers to bring these designs to life. This involved
documenting the new structure and template layout to deliver to a third-party vendor responsible for building the backend of the template.
Compiling, organizing, and editing photography for each page
Discussions and planning with the development team around timelines, functional feasibility, and priorities.
Delivering additional design specifications, personally writing front-end code adjustments, bug testing, and providing markup and feedback.
Making corrections to copy and links after thorough proofreading of the final website.
Final Thoughts
Creating a dynamic website that covered this breadth of content proved to be a huge undertaking, taking over a year for our small team to bring to life from planning to publish. What we were able to create should prove to be an evergreen resource for the university for many years, able to be easily edited and expanded upon in this new template. I was able to present the new site to the entire marking and communications division and promote it as a resource for everyone who creates content for the Clemson brand.
Feedback from communicators and designers across the university has been overwhelmingly positive, praising the ease of ability to find resources and update and manage brand guidance content.
