One of my projects this summer was to get a full web­site out and work­ing for the Com­mu­ni­ca­tions Labs at Sim­mons Col­lege (where I work). The site is basi­cally a resources and news area for stu­dents. The stu­dents that use these labs end up spend­ing a whole lot of time there, and I wanted a space just for them, with the infor­ma­tion they needed.

I actu­ally started this project about a year ago. We had a whole bunch of doc­u­men­ta­tion for the labs writ­ten, but mostly in pdf and Quark doc­u­ments. My goal was to get every­thing online for stu­dents to have easy access. So, with­out much of a plan, I cre­ated a very bare­bones site and started adding stuff to it.

Another member of our depart­ment also cre­ates a monthly newslet­ter which she then emails out to all fac­ulty and stu­dents. It usu­ally comes in the form of an attached pdf. I fig­ures that I should add that to the site as well.

So, at the begin­ning of last summer I basi­cally had an over­grown list of links with a very bare bones design. My goal was to create a more cohe­sive site, with a much more appeal­ing design. We do offer a major in graphic design after all.

My thoughts design-​wise were that I’ve really been dig­ging the plain old black and white designs that I’ve been seeing around. I also like the grid. Given the nature of the page, I thought it was a good place to also finally figure out how to use sIFR.

I had a hard time fig­ur­ing out what my sec­ondary color would be. I’m always drawn to green and blue, but it some­how didn’t quite feel right. I wanted to use red, but that can seems a little too harsh or ster­ile some­times. Then it came to me: magenta. It’s per­fect for the site.

So here is what I ended up with:

Home Page

Archives page for The Comunicator

How to make clipping path (example documentation page)

You can see the whole site here.