The CCI Commons Website won a Gold 2014 Akron ADDY
CCI Commons is a living/learning community for College of Communication and Information majors at Kent State University. Their new website is a dramatic new redesign, with rich colors, large-scale photos and all new content based on user research. The site was a collaboration between the CCI Commons staff, student designers at IdeaBase and myself, at University Communications and Marketing. The refreshed design launches today.
The CCI Commons website supports student recruitment, student retention, promotion of the individual schools within CCI and campus residence hall life at Kent State.
Shelby Muter and Kristin Dowling handled the client relationship and content development, while Shelby and Ian McCullough designed the look and feel of the new website. Ian and I codeveloped the HTML and stylesheets (our third collaboration together). I helped oversee the overall user experience (especially related to touch and mobile), technical testing and content management system integration. I can't say enough about the work ethic of this team. I want to thank Marianne Warzinski and her students at CCI Commons for all of their work on this project as well. As always, thank you to my team at UCM for their support as well.
HIGHLIGHTS
- A beautiful new design and feel that reflects the personality of the student community
- Integration with Kent State's official content management system and standard header
- Responsive design that allows the content to flow and fit the screens of desktop computers, tablets and smartphones
- Retina-ready icons and scaleable SVG graphics that create a crisp feel on high resolution displays
- Hand-drawn and animated icons (aren't these designers talented?)
- An interactive image gallery that introduces students to the CCI Commons community
- RSS integration with a Wordpress blog written by CCI students
OUR TOOLS
- Photoshop: mockups, comps and cropping
- Basecamp: Project management
- Browserstack : Browser testing
- Coda: Editor and subversion client
- Beanstalk: Version control
- Grumpicon: SVG integration
- Respond.js: Magical responsive design polyfill for IE8 and lower
- Galleria: Responsive slideshow that pulls photos from Flickr