University website rebrand

Objectives

The university adopted a new brand in 2022. The needed to be applied to all of the public website and internal web systems. The timeline for adopting the new brand was tight. The new brand was finalised in August 2022 and needed to be implemented on the website by the end of September 2022 ready for the new academic year. The core of the design was a new homepage, but many other key pages had to be completely redesigned. Thousands of other pages on the website would still need to work and be on brand.

Actions

1. Work in detail on a new homepage design. I received Adobe InDesign prototypes from the brand agency which had to be reinterpreted to work as a responsive website using our existing in-house content management system and code.
2. Identify and build key layout components which could be reused on other key pages on the marketing website.
3. Identify quick wins for most of the website, such as adopting new fonts and colours. Work out how these could be incorporated into existing page designs with minimal coding changes, in a way that could be applied quickly to large parts of the website.

Lessons learned

I was able to rework much of the website brand with relatively simple code changes to switch existing colours to new colours, and switch the font. I was able to keep some of the design shapes because they resembled the new brand.

Building new components for key pages such as the homepage took much longer, and far more effort was directed at this. Many components were only inspired by the agency designs, requiring redesign in Figma, then rebuilding in HTML, CSS and JavaScript.