"AIGA presents a wonderful visual onomatopoeia of itself, merging access to meaningful content and the social world." —juror Michael Potts
"Extremely well-organized magazine approach to the AIGA. Action-oriented with cues embedded into the interface, allowing individual pathflows for visitors to connect with and find what they're looking for." —juror Kelly Goto
Overview: More than a mere design update, this site is a main resource for all AIGA-related news from all of its chapters. The redesign facilitates conversation and fosters community in the design industry. With an emphasis on work, community and communication, the homepage is a rotating, module-based presentation that includes easy links to new features and archival content. Colorful shortcuts throughout the site link to job listings, membership information and ways to participate in the dialogue about design. Because the conversation about design has permeated society on multiple levels, the site also gives increased visibility to members and devotes an entire section to highlighting design’s benefit to business and society.
• The concepting and design of the project took over three months.
• The user interface was constructed from the concept that the site is not just for AIGA members, but one that can easily be the center of the design community.
• A dock at the base of every page offers access to other sites in the AIGA family, including Design Envy, Living Principles and AIGA Member Gallery.
Comments by LA Hall:
How did this project compare with others you've worked on in the past? "Redesigning the AIGA website was a daunting task. It posted interesting challenges not only with regard to defining a visual language but designing for a unique user experience: The site needed to serve a vast range of audiences and cover all facets of design and design thinking as a discipline at large.
"The primary difficulty we faced was the treatment of such a massive variety of information and content types. In addition, AIGA is the sum of its chapters. The site needed to clearly reflect that, which set a precedent for valuing past work and AIGA news featured on the site. With the interaction paradigm established by Anna Vogel, the multiple streams of conversation also needed to adapt to the AIGA identity. We designed an infrastructure that stayed true to AIGA, but also evolved to include a flexible system able to speak in different voices of significance and timeliness.
"Initially it was difficult to get everyone on the design team to agree with giving the site a grid layout—we had endless discussions as to what the look of the site should be and how that would dictate the end result user interface. We ultimately decided it was best to proceed with the tessellation-themed webpage that's highly visually and graphically oriented, placing more importance on the culmination of features and posts. It allowed for the site's feed to stay dynamic while having the user interface allow for the discovery of past, yet still relevant and interesting, content."
