California Lutheran University
My work in Higher Education. Projects ranged from front-end development, UX, marketing design, and client support.
2010 – Present
We worked with an outside agency to design an entirely new website for the university in 2015. This coincided with a new brand style and logo mark the year prior. This new design language would provide us with a fresh start to rethink how our web presence would represent the university.
Previously, the website had built up many layers of legacy both in terms of content organization and front-end code. The new site would be created from the ground up with primarily prospective students in mind, our most key audience as a private university.
I helped to evolve the various design components as we implemented the new site with the OUCampus CMS across the campus. Due to the complexity of the site, the entire CSS framework was written using the SASS preprocessor. As the front-end developer, this streamlines a lot of the code and helps developing consistent looking design elements.
Since then, this design system has been the basis of many auxiliary sites connected to the university.
A university website serves many different audiences. The challenge of the homepage is to provide a gateway to the entire site, while still being focused on messaging. As a private university, almost the entire health and growth of the institution is based on attracting prospective students to apply and attend. The homepage has to tell the story of the university. We developed this concept of section rows to focus the user on different topics as they scroll down the page. Different sections are created as needed to promote a major event such as homecoming or to announce a new initiative such as the sciences campaign.
CalLutheran.edu
This page was created to better communicate the complexities of understanding the costs of attending college. As with the homepage, this layout was broken down into topic sections. Designing this page also gave the opportunity to use a variety of visual aids such as the graphs and charts. This was achieved by using the Chartist Javascript library draw SVG charts from data we pass in. These chart elements have since been standardized and moved into our global framework to be used on any other page.
Financial Aid Affordability
This was a new site we spun up to help drive the campaign to build a new science facility on the Cal Lutheran campus. Borrowing many ideas from the main site, I built the HTML and CSS for the Science site.
Science at Cal Lutheran
Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary is the theological graduate school of Cal Lutheran. PLTS maintains somewhat of its own identity, so this site was an opportunity to retune our templates specifically for their needs.
Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary