A year or two ago, rather famously around these parts, KU paid an out-of-town design firm close to $90,000 to design a new “signature.” (The fact that this overpriced work is quite reminiscent of another school’s logo is still cause for conversation.)
This was just one part of KU’s visual identity push. New letterhead. New business cards. And for gosh sakes, your departmental website better look like everything else on campus! To accomplish that last bit, the KU Web Strategy Team (yes, that’s a real working group) developed a convoluted, server side includes-based template system and strongly suggested a speedy adoption of said templates by all departments.
I refuse to apply these templates to my work at Stratepedia–those are web applications, not sites, and a row of buttons pointing to KU-specific stuff will just confuse the 98% of my audience that’s not affiliated with the university. But I bit and switched over one of my sites to the template, mostly so it would match with the rest of the CRL’s site.
Anyway, here is what I came up with for the Content Literacy Continuum website. It wasn’t too bad to migrate over because it doesn’t have a whole lot of content, but I was able to take the KU templates, move them to my server, and get everything working within a couple of hours. The big point I like to make with these shots is that the stock photos are of kids who’ve accomplished something from all that help CLC gives them–they’re not toiling away in the classroom or huddled around a computer screen like so many other stock photo kids on education-oriented websites are. Maybe I’m the only one who appreciates that.
I’m just going to share the one shot because it’s not like I did a lot of design work here–please don’t blame me for the boring font selection.
