College Web Guy

If you haven’t been paying attention, Jason Santa Maria has been pushing the curve with his personal website lately.

He writes in his latest post about something dear to my heart, as it relates to where I want to take our university web templates.

“I’m trying to maintain a fairly tight visual identity, while exploring the flexibility for change under time, technical, and visual limitations. The point is to find variation within constraints.”

“In the scope of this site, I’m defining art direction as bringing the visual design into the fold as an equal partner to the content, while maintaining a consistent overall identity. When a newspaper runs a special feature, they may flex the layout a bit differently, add imagery or typefaces to evoke a mood present in the writing, or merely to reinforce the story. When a magazine has a feature on a topic, they might do the same thing. It isn’t always groundbreaking, but it’s treated like something special apart from the main run of design. In my mind, art direction isn’t simply nice visuals, and more times than not, it’s a practice of restraint.”

Of course, this is all fine and good for one person working on his personal site.

The challenge for university web designers is that we’re trying to deploy options for a large group of website owner/operators, and those users in general will, (let’s be honest) inevitably misuse any measure of flexibility we provide ….to screw things up.  Not everybody should be able to “art direct”.

Balance that realization with my dislike of all-things-cookie-cutter.  Colleges and Departments want to differentiate.  And I want to help them, within reason.

The beauty of  top-level stylesheets and content management, is that we can now plan for and MANAGE “variation within constraints”.  We can build-in options.  We allow for and “curate” a certain measure of customization.

This struggle is the all-consuming part of my job, and I’m my own worst critic.

I posted something on this blog, a year or so ago about the goals we have for our “templates”:
Awesome. This is the part where I use blockquote to quote my own self.  A new threshold of egotism has been reached.

It’s been a goal since my first day on the job, but now it’s of even higher priority to reshape/refine/upgrade/expand and yes redesign some major design elements of our college website.The challenge of web design for universities, for me, is rooted in the conflict between flexibility and maintainability. Yes, you want all the pages, everyone’s page, or site, to look good, and to communicate. So the easy answer is to provide EVERYONE with the same look and feel, and identical framework to build on. But within a university are different organizations, different colleges, departments, administrative offices, etc.. many of which have their own marketing goals. They want the ability to differentiate.

The goal I have, the challenge I’m taking on is to expand our online design options, to allow for variety. Sustainable, maintainable, variety. …If there exists such a thing.

It isn’t an easy task. I’m burying myself in different template ideas. And “template” may not even be the operative description. Another way to label this challenge is to think of it as building a “design library” made up of interchangeable elements that fit together as a whole. Website managers will have the ability to select specific options and activate certain content areas from within our content management tool.

The vision for this project is shared by the other members of our web team, and we’re all invested in the idea of providing an ever expanding variety of layout and theming options for websites that carry our university logo.

You should see some of these mockups. A few have potential. Several are catastrophic failures. In a month or so I’ll come up for air and try to make sense of it all.

Design. Redesign. Rinse. Repeat.