Center for Academic Innovation Website
Concept
The Center for Academic Innovation at Saginaw Valley State University (SVSU) wanted to update and reinvent their website in order to make sure new information was made available to SVSU faculty with a more modern look and feel.
Description
Website with a home page and eight subsequent web pages compatible with desktop computer, laptop, tablet, and smartphone screen size
Discipline
Web
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Date
2019-2020
Software
Illustrator, TerminalFour
Project Rationale
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In terms of typography, I was limited in my choices since many of the fonts came standard with the TerminalFour templates. The placement of the text was totally up to me, so I encouraged my team to go for a design that highlighted the main titles of the pages (in red) and created hierarchy while moving down the page with changes in text size and boldness of font. All the fonts were sans-serif which allows for a higher readability level for viewers.
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All of the colors used in the banners and images on the site reflected those of Saginaw Valley State University's school color standards. This brought consistency to the site as the user navigated the various pages. All of the photos were taken by the staff photographer at our office or from SVSU's school photo repository to keep a local and personal look and feel to the site.
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Lots of negative space was implemented throughout the site in order to keep the screen from looking cluttered and disorganized. Keeping lots of negative space on the pages allow the eye of the viewer to have a break from the immense amounts of text that my office required on each of the website's pages.
Before the Update
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The image above is a great example of what the site looked like before the decision was made to update the look and organization of the Center for Academic Innovation's site. It took about 4 months of planning to execute the finished site (which you can see in the images above. A few main goals were to move the side navigation menu to the top of the screen to make the site user-friendly, rid the site of stretched and skewed images to make the site more pleasing to look at, and to break up the text on the site so the user can get to the information they were looking for in a more efficient manner.