MassArtID.com

Web Design, User Experience, Graphic Design

Timeline:

Sept 2018 - Present

This website is being designed as a standalone asset for MassArt's Industrial Design department. It serves dual purposes: to provide resources to current students, and to inform and attract prospective students.

MassArtID.com is a site for the students, by a student.

This area is all about highlighting the amazing people who work and study in the department, and the things they go on to do.

A lot of people don't even know what industrial design is. This is where to send them when they ask if you design factories.

There are a lot of resources available to ID students, but they're not always as discoverable as they could be. We aimed to fix that.

Managing your academic curriculum can be a daunting task. When their advisor isn't available for questions, students can come here to get answers.

The job hunt is the scary light awaiting us all at the end of the education tunnel. We aim to make the journey a little less intimidating.

Warning - Process

The content past this banner is process-related. If you're not a potential employer or design nerd, you might find this stuff dry. Proceed with caution. Click below if you wanna skip to the results.

Project Overview

The Goal

This website began out of a desire amongst the Industrial Design faculty to portray the department in a way that would communicate what we do, what we’re about, and what makes us special. Additionally, we wanted to provide current students with resources that might otherwise be difficult to discover.

My Role

Research, user experience design, web design, graphic design, photography, copywriting, and pretty much anything else that needed to be done!

The Process

A lot of research, plenty of revisions, and a bunch of experimentation.

The Result

A fully-realized site which will serve as both an advertisement for the Industrial Design program and a resource for its students. The site is currently in open beta, and we plan to officially launch it before my graduation in May 2020.

Current Students

Just completing the Industrial Design curriculum can be a daunting task. There are a lot of common issues experienced by ID students, and we wanted to try to alleviate those. By answering common questions, and pointing students in the direction of invaluable resources, we hope to help students spend more of their time on the work that matters.

Faculty

As the stewards of our students' journey to becoming full-time designers, the faculty have a vested interest in seeing their students succeed. As practicing designers, they also want to see fresh talent emerging with the tools to tackle real-world problems. And as teachers, they obviously want to see new students coming into the program.

Prospective Students

This includes both first-year MassArt students and curious high schoolers. The ID department's declaration pool is pretty small year-over-year. It makes sense - while it's a growing industry, ID is still fairly niche compared to graphics or illustration. Our goal was to make the department more discoverable by building a platform on which the department could talk about itself.

Administration

The administration's main ambition for the new website was for it to fit within MassArt's existing web presence. As the Industrial Design program is already covered on MassArt's main site, the school wanted to ensure that the new site was unique enough to warrant its existence.

Who's it for?

A successful site meant taking everyone's wants and needs into consideration. This included two distinct user groups and two distinct stakeholder groups.

Issues:

The Unknown

Most people's response to hearing "I study industrial design" is "what's that?" Even those who are aware of industrial design might be unsure what possible career paths such a degree might offer (a lot), or the specifics of what happens in the curriculum (a lot).

Resource

Our current students have a lot of tough things to figure out - both in the studio and in the real world. We wanted to help them by answering common questions and directing them towards valuable resources.

Low Visibility

ID doesn't receive a lot of declarations from first-years. I wasn't even aware MassArt had an Industrial Design program until someone told me the week of major declaration! This is partially due to the fact that the department doesn't have the sort of presence on campus that larger departments such as painting and illustration do.

Opportunities:

Research

I started this project by digging deep and learning as much as I could - about who I was designing for, what their needs were, and what kind of content we’d need to fulfill those needs. But this wasn’t a one-and-done deal. Throughout the process, research has played a key role in improving the site.

User testing with Bradley - a senior in the ID department.

Sending out surveys for large-scale feedback

Building the site

Building the site happened gradually over the course of the project, with many tweaks and iterations throughout.

Sitemap

Early prototype

User flows

Visual brand language

In addition to building the site, I also developed the visual brand language for it. This was based off of MassArt's existing brand language, but I gave everything a twist to make it more unique to us.

The logo is based off of MassArt's -23° angle which appears throughout their branding. To make it more compatible with the department's name, I flipped it.

The Palette is also derived from MassArt’s, but reworked to speak to the energetic, cutting edge nature of industrial design.

We wanted to portray the studio environment as it is in real life: social, productive, fun, and sometimes a little crazy. Our imagery doesn’t shy away from the less photogenic aspects of studio life.