Saint Paul College

is an inclusive college for all learners. We partnered to evolve their brand, redesign their website, and build their CMS.

ABOUT THE PROJECT

Saint Paul College is located in Saint Paul, Minnesota. They serve a variety of types of students with over 11,000 enrolled. They offer 60+ programs and 70+ degrees and certificates. The college partnered with Object to update its website with a new CMS and front-end experience.

The project started with a Discovery Phase of research and analysis. This included surveys, audits, focus group sessions, and ongoing meetings with the core project team. Through the discovery findings, we learned there was a desire to evolve the existing visual brand design language. We then started with a branding exercise to update existing brand elements and create a new future state with all new colors, fonts, illustrations, icons, and holistic design language.

BRAND EVOLUTION

When redesigning a website, we typically see this as an opportunity to either evolve an existing brand to a digital experience or completely rethink brand ingredients to align with a new website. In updating the Saint Paul College brand there were two major brand evolutions. The first was a new color palette that would meet WCAG compliance and extend the visual design language. This meant modifying the college's "school colors". We also added accent colors to highlight key information and infuse diversity and energy into the brand.

We also updated the college's typography selections with two new font families. The first is a custom typeface used just for Saint Paul College – Saint Paul Sans designed by Arilla Studio. The second typeface VTC Terra designed by Vocal Type's Tré Seals. VTC Terra is used as an expression typeface to add visual interest, while Saint Paul Sans is used for clarity and user interface information.

Included in the project was a new approach to imagery. We created a new set of over 100+ icons and 20+ illustrations. The icons are used for way-finding and user interface elements. The illustrations add visual interest and explain or show complex ideas or concepts that a simple icon cannot. We also conducted a multi-day photo shoot to capture new photography for the college and specific use for the website. This included a lifestyle shoot to capture real students and faculty on campus. We also did a profile photo shoot highlighting selected students to showcase them in a student success stories section of the website.

WEBSITE EXPERIENCE

During the Discovery Phase, we highlight key challenges and areas of opportunity. Through this strategy exercise, we developed core principles for the project. The three principles were Prospects Are the Focus, Perception is Key, and Explain the Why. These help evaluate decision-making that impacts information architecture, navigation, user experience, and content development.

One area that had consistent negative feedback was navigation, organization, and finding key information. We addressed this with a primary navigation set to meet the needs of prospects who have a limited time frame of consideration, therefor you need to guide them to the information they are looking for quickly. We also created a megamenu to help users quickly find or navigate to key information more efficiently. We also wanted the website search to be more accurate in terms of results. We built a custom search application with a scoring system that allows the college to manipulate search results to be more accurate to the desired results a user is looking for and where the college would like to guide them. This creates a more robust search tool than out-of-the-box solutions. We also added an A to Z Index to allow users to navigate by topic or word to the page most likely to cover what they are looking for.