160Over90

Agency

160Over90

Client

The Lawrenceville School

Timeframe

3 Months

Team

Creative Director, Account Director, Digital Designer (me), Senior Content Strategist, Senior Producer

URL

Live Site

Overview

The purpose of this project was to remove the athletics subpages of the existing Lawrenceville main institution website and create a separated responsive site experience for the athletics department. The primary goal was to create a new site that was impactful, branded and representative of the so-called Big Red spirit of The Lawrenceville School.

The primary users were prospective student athletes between the ages of 13 and 15. Followed by current student athletes and parents. Due to the immense time constraints on final delivery and a lack of resources for a formal UX process, I was not at liberty to conduct full fledged qualitative user research before proceeding with an iterative cycle of sketches, wireframes and mockup designs.

However, a lot of information had been collected on competitor sites and some of the trends in their design solutions, so I felt comfortable moving forward after my own initial barebones research and discovery phase.

My Role

My role was to serve as the sole and lead digital designer on the project, taking early initial concepts and producing a complete design system for CMS implementation with third party development firm Final Site CMS.

Scope and Constraints

This project was on a very tight timetable. I was basically given less than two months to take a couple of early round mockup designs and expand it into final primary pages and multiple subpages. These page designs would then need to be deconstructed into individual components for a final development package (“dev pack”) or miniature design system for CMS implementation. These highly organized Sketch files included all global styles such as color, typography, iconography, featured hero graphics and much more. I basically moved as quickly and as iteratively as I could, consolidating stakeholder feedback each day.

Design process

I started this project by gathering as much information as possible about the client, work product done at that point, presentation decks, competitive analysis, sitemaps, meeting notes / memos and a general sense of what each stakeholder on the project was aiming for in the end.

The current athletics pages were not an actual separated website but subpages tied into the school’s larger institution site (which was also being redesigned by 160Over90 down the line).

Between October 2019 and January 2020 - when I came onboard the team - there had been several internal and external meetings with the client to discuss the project vision, business objectives and creative direction. What the client felt was missing from their current site, data on their competitor’s websites and overall business goals and objectives dictating the rapid timeline for the redesign.

What I Did

Initially, I collaborated with the original lead digital designer - who was leaving the agency one week after I started on the project. The team also consisted of a senior producer, a senior copywriter, an account director, a senior content strategist, an associate creative director and an executive creative director. Together we distilled core brand messaging into a visual language that illustrates the prestige, boldness, integrity and athleticism of Lawrenceville student athletes.

After a few weeks of sketches, wireframes and several rounds of iterations, I had begun to flesh out the main pages specified by the senior content strategist’s site map.

Once the primary pages in the site flow were completed for both desktop and mobile, there were several secondary pages. Given that so many components had already been designed, assembling these remaining pages proved to be somewhat straightforward albeit time consuming.

Outcomes

After a long series of internal working sessions, solo UI design production deep work and multiple client presentations, I was able to deliver a fully fleshed out responsive component library or dev pack. While COVID-19 ended my contract early and precluded me from post-launch metrics, the site specifications were approved by the third party development team on time.