The Agency just launched our most recent site and my newest design: commencement.nd.edu.

This is intended to be live all year and serve as a resource for all information related to Commencement, including (but not limited to) parking, schedules, cap and gown distribution and how to avoid paying attention to low-flying aircraft.

I’ve noticed that we’re (I’m) starting to steer away from the classic ND site model (global nav/feature image/elevator pitch/news/events). Questioning a lot of our long standing habits as encouraged us to think about why we do specific things with designs. The introduction of more rigorous user testing under the new leadership of Social Media Advocate Chas Grundy has made it possible to test these questions.

I’ve learned to be a web designer over the last few years largely by ripping off Jim’s designs wholesale. (I’m kidding).

When you wake up after a long period of time and you can’t remember why we always have “News” and “Events” on all of our sites when there isn’t much need for “News” or “Events,” it’s time to question if there isn’t a better way.

The Commencement site has been designed to dispense with the “Welcome to the University of Notre Dame…” inertial sales pitch (that, at any rate, is available all over nd.edu for those who need it), and get people to where they need to go as quickly as possible.

In that regard, you could probably argue that the feature image is a bit superfluous and only serves to push the launching buttons further down the page. It was added in, to give the whole composition a bit more kick, but also because on the day of the event, and after the Commencement weekend draws to a close, that particular area of the site will be used to push users to the recorded video content of the event.

Check out this Flickr set to see some of my other site design work.

Creative Director: Tim Legge; Client Relations: Joe Lyphout; Web director: Chas Grundy; Designed by: me; Coded by: Erik Runyon and Ryan Dunwiddie.