Designed for Vassar College, 2011 · www.vassar.edu
There's no place like home. Certainly not on the Vassar web, where our home pages - always designed in-house - have regularly featured strong and constantly changing graphical treatments. In early 2011, we re-launched our home page to highlight our newly bolstered collection of campus photography - much of it gathered during the Sesquicentennial project - and created an online museum of Vassar imagery in the process.
Design
Over the past few years, we'd been moving towards larger and larger photos on the Vassar home page. As the average connection speed increased, and screen sizes got larger, we shifted from banners to backgrounds. Unfortunately, the previous design required the main linkset to be front and center on the page, with the result that the content usually sat smack in the middle of the background photo. It was getting hard to find photos that worked. I started rethinking the home page as an independent project, and one of my first goals was to come up with something that didn't just include imagery but celebrated it.
