Seattle Colleges
Goals
Show a much more coherent visual identity to enhance image and reputation. Offer a dynamic and accessible website that works well on mobile devices, tablets, and desktop computers. Capture the Seattle Colleges experience through strong photography, good storytelling, and clear information. Move toward more consistent web navigation and terminology across all Seattle Colleges websites.
Role: Design lead, visual design, content strategy
The design features full-width banners of students from each college. The shoot was on the same day, so the lighting and filters give a cohesive look and feel. A fellow designer and I chose photos, made adjustments, and cropped them so they would size down for a device-agnostic experience.
The class of 2020 was UNSTOPPABLE! I built a section around the campaign to house videos, music, yard signs, photos, and other collateral. I customized the template to feature a full-width video. For accessibility, the media embed is close-captioned and does not autoplay.
We serve a diverse user base as a family of community colleges. Working on an initiative called Seattle Promise allowed us to impact the community by creating access to higher education. Our team delivered an accessible, intuitive, responsive website for application information, orientation, events, and chat support. We exceeded the enrollment target by a large margin. I was the design lead for the project.
Seattle Promise had brand guidelines from an agency partner. I retrofitted them inside our design system to bring clarity to the user experience. I led the design of event landing page templates that became part of our new design system library.
I work closely with other designers. I love getting notes like this: These charts don't need to fill the whole column. Can they be flush left with the indented text? See the sample (red lines) and let me know what is possible. Thanks much, Reed.
South Seattle's graphic designer created icons for Seattle Colleges' Areas of Study. I implemented them as icon fonts for the websites so they would be SVG (clean markup and crisp on retina devices).
We created a district-wide people finder. I designed the user interface with a fellow designer/developer. Faculty can display their courses for the current and upcoming quarters. They have tools to update background information and blog. The design is meant to be usable and inviting.
I have started to replace the row/column structure with CSS Grid. One day I said on Slack, I think we use CSS grid. The dev replies followed. 👏 I like CSS grid, much better than the way we currently split the row/column...Yes. I love that shit.
Outcomes
College leadership directly attributed recent wins to the website design. They said the website is enhancing its image and reputation. Amazon announced a grant to support the start-up of a new Bachelor of Science in Computer Science for the Seattle Colleges Foundation. Seattle Promise applications are up 30% for the class of 2022.