Creative director/copywriter — Mike Silvia
Brand designer — Leyna Le
Web designer/developer — me, Jonathan!

Where was this school when I was in 5th grade? Beautiful facilities (like a saltwater pool), a modern building, great tools, and a blended learning environment. We wanted the design for this school to be modern and stately.

I took the brand guide developed by Leyna, looked at the preliminary content for the site, and began building out a web design vocabulary.

Wireframes with desktop/mobile layouts.

From there, I worked through a number of rounds of iterations to get a few features just right. Starting with wireframes for layout, and then adding in typography, I began to work out the hierarchy.

I ran through some type experiments alongside flats to get a feeling for how flexible the fonts I was looking at would be. I ended up finding a web font that paired nicely with the brand font selected by Leyna, while giving us enough flexibility to create a lot of looks.

A major concern was updating the application form. The client was using a PDF to collect applications, and we knew this had to change. We built a custom form, grouping and consolidating fields as much as possible to reduce drag.

Unfortunately we were unable to sell the client on a multi-page form solution, which has been shown to increase form completions, but I was still proud of the design and user experience we delivered on a complex application.