Lead site builds

I especially enjoy creating new web sites and helping people think through what they really want to communicate and the best possible way to display that in a digital space. The following examples are team projects that also demonstrate responsive design strategy.

Leadership Education at Duke Divinity
Leadership Education at Duke Divinity needed an online presence, and I was one of the leaders of the team that brought it to life.

On this project, I evaluated vendors who would be a good match for our work culture and strategic needs. (We selected Kompleks Creative, whom I highly endorse.) I translated the organization’s vision into technical functional requirements and worked directly with the designer and developer throughout the project. One of my strengths is speaking two languages — articulating technical and sustainable structural needs when talking to a developer, but also knowing how to take the opportunities and restrictions back to the senior leadership team and present them in a way that they understand to make informed choices. I’ve also learned how to ask the right questions to reveal how to organize site navigation and prioritize the real estate of a homepage.

I want to highlight one of my favorite aspects of this project: how the information architecture addresses the different ways people might explore a website. The site uses labels direct from the custom offerings of the organization, but it also provides more personal entry points. While those two things were the most important ways our organization wanted to communicate, it’s not how people search for help on the internet. The people our programs most need to reach will begin an internet search because they need answers to specific questions. We were able to look to past programs and collect specific questions that our programs helped people resolve in their own work life. Those questions, and how our programs addressed them, became an important aspect of how this site was built with online reader behavior in mind.

I look back at this project and consider it a great example of how an organization’s goals and the needs of an audience can both be taken into account in a web design. You don’t have to sacrifice one for the other, and if you do, your end product won’t be successful.

I have other lessons from this process that I would be happy to share. Please ask!

Faith & Leadership redesign

In 2015, we launched a redesign of Faith & Leadership. We conducted a usability study that showed that mixing certain institutional efforts together was confusing to readers. As a result, we emphasized two important philosophies in the update: clean design and accessibility.

Working with Duke Web Services, we completely restructured our menus so that not only would there be fewer labels, but those phrases would better align with readers’ mental model for exploring a website. Our new menu makes it very easy for readers to find what they want, using phrases that they were more likely to seek. By listing fewer choices, visitors are more likely to read what is listed (also known as the “less is more” approach).

On a technical level, the entire site is now responsive. This means that it will work on a desktop computer, tablet, kindle, or mobile phone. It will automatically resize and display the most appropriate menu visual based on the screen available. Pages look more elegant and work better in whatever context someone might want to use the site. We can already see from our analytics that this is changing how our audience interacts with us: Mobile use increased 36% since last year.

A Foundation for Theological Education

Since it’s formation, this nonprofit has awarded more than $3 million in grants to students pursuing doctoral degrees.

The interesting challenge about this project was finding the right look and feel. The foundation needed to convey a scholarly tone and draw upon its historical tradition; however, the visual design needed to also communicate modern relevancy and viability into the future.

Creative Direction

Our group published an ebook this year. I worked with the publisher and executive director to execute the most important messages of the book into an appropriate visual. After a few mockups that weren’t a good fit for our organization or message, I came up with an idea that took the major concerns into consideration.  Ultimately, it was approved to become the finished product.  We hired graphic artist Charles Peters and I oversaw the design process from concept to completion, ensuring that the color palette, artistic style, logo, etc. all adhered to our visual standards and editorial needs. Though I was serving as a creative director, I was able to draw upon my own experience as a graphic designer in this project. You can see some of my original cover designs on this site.