Fiercely Forward
About the project
Date:
Jan 30, 2025
Client:
Clemson University
Services:
UI Design Branding
Project Details
Originally this campaign was aimed at raising capital from key donors but as the capital campaign portion began to launch leadership decided we would pivot to expand the use of this messaging to our wider marketing and communications efforts.
Graphic treatments, messaging formats and overall visual styles were established in the original campaign concept and it would then be our division's job to translate and expand on those in a way that would apply to the other areas of marketing.
With only roughly a month's notice we were tasked with a soft launch to the general public with further developments and additions following afterwards.
Across these first several months of the campaign I was able to integrate the new campaign across the primary pages of the website, add the visual treatment as part of an admissions overhaul, and redesign the university homepage using the new branding.
Things I Did
First as part of the soft launch I brainstormed with our other designers and leadership to ideate on ways to incorporate the new visual identity into the website and from there identify what would be quick but high impact visual updates that could be done within the initial short turn around for the soft launch.
From there we decided to focus on the main gateway pages into Clemson.edu and redesign their primary mastheads. After researching the existing campaign assets and prototyping some design ideas in Figma I landed on a basic design to execute.
The next major addition came with a new overhaul of the admissions website. This section is one of the most trafficked portions of the site. Every student who applies or enrolls will engage with it in some way. Work incorporating the new campaign had already begun with our admissions print designers so I also connected with their team to ensure some visual consistency across all of our admissions content.
After a review if the new website structure and the content of key pages, I identified…
Similar areas of content to create new repeatable branded elements
Which pages would benefit the most from new visuals and design efforts in our development timeframe
Additions to these pages that would be scalable across the wider Clemson website after completion
After deciding on where to focus custom design efforts on I fully designed new layouts and elements with the new styles while other team members focused on building out the other pages of the site with our existing template styles.
These updates included new typography styles for page headings, a new homepage masthead scaled to compliment the other gateways, section background textures and treatments, button styles, and student feature elements.
Initial Results from the admissions project in the 4 months since have shown positive improvement in overall page performance over last year and campaign goals.
As the campaign is ongoing I am continuing to expand these efforts into web projects as they arise. The next major example being the University homepage. This page sees almost 2 million page-views each year and must serves all of the universities primary audiences.
My role in this project has further involved assisting with content planning and the UX direction of the page starting with research into our key audiences, analysis of current page performance and user behaviors. I worked closely with our marketing director and content writers to develop a new content structure and content outline informed by our research. From there our writers took that structure and developed the rest of our content incorporating the messaging goals of Fiercely Forward. This was followed on my end with wireframes and prototype applying more visual elements of the campaign as well.
This process led to more new design elements and provided an opportunity to refine some of the changes that were made in the admissions project. As the goals and execution of this campaign continues to evolve this same process research, evaluation, addition and refinement will be the approach with my web projects.
