Kenyon: General recommendations: Design

One of the most common requests we’ve heard from Kenyon folks. While keeping everything accessible, we’re planning to include much more photographic imagery in the Kenyon redesign.

Kenyon’s location is one of its primary differentiators, for better or worse. Kenyon’s new site should clearly reflect its unique location.

It should be immediately clear where the important information is, and where the top level navigation items are. We will create much more diversity of text size and style in the new design, and will use visual elements to guide the visitor more efficiently around the site.

We won’t lock all the Kenyon site content into a rigid box with specifically defined, constrained content areas. Working within the CMS’s demands, we will create a design that allows more freedom in the display of content, depending on stakeholders’ individual needs.

Photos without context lose meaning— especially in higher ed, where particular types of photos (smiling students, brick buildings) are becoming clichés. We will push Kenyon towards a closer integration of photos and content. This means captions and context for photos, as well as a better relationship between the photos used on a page and the page’s content itself.

Kenyon’s print materials demonstrate a great deal of confidence— instead of rushing to push as much information to the viewer as possible, they act more magnetically, inviting the reader to come inside. The Web is a different medium, but we think a similar result can be achieved through a bold approach to design, especially on the homepage.

Great site designs all have this kind of confidence to them. While their designers might do user testing and focus grouping, the sites don’t look focus-grouped. Rather, they work as the expression of a great idea, honed and developed among a small group of informed, committed individuals, with community input incorporated along the way where appropriate. That’s what we’re going for.