Bard Early College
Bard Early College (BEC) offers New York City public school students the amazing opportunity to get a head start on higher education.
Overview
BEC bridges the socioeconomic gap by immersing high school students in authentic college study. The result is an increase in college application rates and the lifelong benefits of higher education.
Challenge
BEC’s previous website served the organization well, but over time the site had become crowded with outmoded content and suffered from an overall weakened user experience.
Our solution: perform an in-depth audit to identify relevant content while archiving the rest. We then collaborated with BEC to organize new content such as photos, videos and text. From this we produced a new content matrix and a fresh communication strategy.
Messaging
We proceeded to ideate using several keywords and phrases to arrive at a simple, memorable positioning statement.
Color
Adhering to Bard’s brand guidelines was a formal design requirement of this project. Bard’s general color scheme is red, black, grey, and white. For example, the red hex color Bard uses for websites is #AD1A1F.
Accessibility
Reaching the broadest possible audience is key to advancing the mission of any nonprofit organization. Auditory, neurological, visual, and physical disabilities affect people indiscriminately. State and federally funded nonprofits are required to conform with WCAG 2.0 Level AA web accessibility guidelines.
Website Planning
Planning is the first stage in our process and also the most important. It’s where all the foundational decisions are made. Defining, ideating, sketching, iterating — we proceed through a formal process documented by technical schematics such as user flows, site maps and wireframes. It is the blueprint that inspires the design.
Interface Design
BEC’s new UI/UX is a reflection of their academic mission. It is also reflective of themes such as diversity and inclusion — themes that fuel that mission.
Once inside, the user experience is simple and intuitive without the type of extraneous features often found on institutional websites.
Home Page Design
Custom home page design with balanced messaging for students, faculty, alumni and financial supporters. You may notice an extreme sense of contrast between the text and the background. This is an intentional design decision for the purpose of adhering to WCAG 2.0 Level AA web accessibility guidelines.
Interior
View of an interior page. Easy to read copy and concisely written.
Multilingual
Harnessing WordPress’ plugin technology and Google’s AI translation technology, we were able to convert the english language website into multiple language versions with ease. The result is neural machine translation with human level quality; editable; multilingual SEO-enabled search engine indexing.
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