During my time at The Guild Hall, occasionally I would be asked to work on external projects on top of what I was already working on for the campus. One of these projects was to redesign The Jacob and Gwen Lawrence Legacy Resource Center website. At the time, the website was several years old, not mobile responsive, and suffered from several broken links. My task was to quickly analyze the website, create mockups to send to the client, code the website (with help on displaying the image database), and upload it online.
I started with information architecture and brainstormed what the visual design may look like. The new website wouldn’t change much—the main task was to do some housekeeping with old information and modernize the code under the surface—so I kept the theme of each page having a different colored header. As a new feature, I added an interactive timeline to the front page.
Jacob Lawrence’s work features bright, vibrant colors, and sharp angles, so I brought some of the angularity over into the design.
The final website design launched looking almost identical to the mockups—there were only a few small changes. The gallery search function now takes up the full screen, and the proposed contact form would remain it’s own page instead of becoming a popup modal present on each page.
Completed in 2015, as of 2019, the design still remains online. Check it out!