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
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 and what the name of the site would be. 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 head writer agreed.
I did a lot of device sizing with Figma. We wanted the pictures to be big and the copy easy to read. I iterated quickly so we could get a feel for how the stories would read depending on window size.
The templates were built for ease of use. Story pages had each content field clearly marked for the admin view. This made building pages simple for communications folks.
The communications team made sure to have the same lighting for each set of stories so the pages and grid looked cohesive.
The stories are impactful, inspiring, and most of all hopeful. We took a device agnostic approach, spent time crafting how they would read on small screens. We wanted the user experience to be enjoyable no matter what.
The site grew into a go-to for feature stories and events. Student Leadership held a mascot redesign contest and did the main communication by posting on the site.
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.