Academy of Art University
Education
The Academy of Art University was founded in 1929 in the San Francisco Bay Area with a vision focused on the importance of design, advertising and the fundamentals of art. After many generations of graduates, the Academy of Art has cemented itself as an industry leader and the largest art university in the United States. Our focus with the academy has been to modernize their digital brand and provide them with the tools to grow and expand across web marketing, on-line education and the Learning Management System (LMS).
Services
Project Type
The Academy of Art University was founded in 1929 in the San Francisco Bay Area with a vision focused on the importance of design, advertising and the fundamentals of art. After many generations of graduates, the Academy of Art has cemented itself as an industry leader and the largest art university in the United States. Our focus with the academy has been to modernize their digital brand and provide them with the tools to grow and expand across web marketing, on-line education and the Learning Management System (LMS).
Services
Project Type
While we often focus on workshops, hackathons and focus groups, we decided to take a less traditional approach for our work with the Academy. We concentrated on engaging students as they went about their day-to-day activities such as talking over coffee, smoking in nearby allies, and working in campus lobbies. We even took the opportunity to teach multiple UX classes where we discussed best practices and absorbed the students’ feedback and ideas.
High School Student
Senior year students choosing college
Parent
High school students' parents and family members
Working Professional
Shift in career - interested in Graduate programs
Military/Veteran
Military Members & Veterans
Content Goals
Based on our research and UX phase, the need for a holistic reorganization of all pages, global information architecture and content strategy was necessary. To lead the team on this front, we worked with multiple stakeholders and their departments to strategize around content prioritization revealing many opportunities for new approaches, search engine optimization and split testing in the real world.
To hone in on the aesthetics of the new digital brand, we led multiple workshops to prioritize how we wanted to position the brand in the look and feel stage, eventually creating both a design principle document as well as a brand mission statement document to be used as a grounding stone and to avoid subject feedback in the process.
We conducted interviews with students, faculty and stakeholder to collect their feedback and ensure that our design is communicating the right message, feel and personality to target audience.
We focused on:
By continually refocusing on our design principles, brand mission statement and content inventory, we were able to drive impact though content creation, video mixes and photography that resonated with our target audience.
We were not surprised by the overwhelming commitment from our target audiences to their mobile devices, reinforcing the need for speedy page loads, a systemized approach to serving optimized and cropped assets, as well as information architecture and navigation which translated to mobile in a fluid way.
