Story pages for Start Your Life's Work site Story pages for Start Your Life's Work site

Impact

Goals

Design a story-driven, responsive website, emphasizing impactful life-changing stories of students to help feature the Seattle Central College life experience. Central’s marketing and outreach team needed help adding an accessible and engaging recruitment tool to connect with everyday students.

Role: Project lead, content design, visual design, user experience

Front, story wireframes Front, story wireframes

First I wireframed sketches so we could start to see what the content design might look like. We had brainstorming sessions about the content design. Start Your Life's Work was the name of the theme but we needed something short for the url. I said what about "Impact" and the lead writer agreed.

Mobile design in Figma Mobile design in Figma

I did a lot of device sizing with Figma. We wanted the pictures to be big and the copy easy to read. I iterated so we could get a feel for how the stories would read depending on window size.

Admin view next to front view Admin view next to front view

Story pages had each content field marked for the admin view. Building pages was simple for communications folx.

Impact story photography Impact story photography

The communications team made sure to have the same lighting for each set of stories. The pages and grid looked cohesive.

Mobile device story view Mobile device story view

The stories are impactful, inspiring, and hopeful. We took a device-agnostic approach and spent time crafting how they would read on small screens. We wanted the user experience to be enjoyable no matter what.

Seattle Central Bengal Tigers mascot Seattle Central Bengal Tigers mascot

The site grew into a go-to for feature stories and events. Student Leadership held a mascot redesign contest and did the communication by posting on the site.

Tablet story view tablet-stories

Outcomes

Impact has been a valuable way to feature the true grit of Seattle Central students . And it has proved to be a user-friendly structure for writers to quickly post new stories. We continue to add new features as needs arise.