MIAMIAN MAGAZINE ONLINE
PROJECT SCOPE
Web Design
Accessibility
THE CHALLENGE
With a focus on accessibility, design and build the alumni magazine online.
The Brief: Take the biannual alumni magazine, Miamian, and build it out in an online format in order to increase the access to and shareability of the content and stories within it. This allows the stories to be utilized in a number of other ways including release in digital publications and being pushed to the alumni and development homepages.
WIREFRAMES
To start the process, I took an audit of Miamian to familiarize myself with how the magazine was set up. The type of content is consistent across each issue, which made a templated layout feasible. Each issue contains four feature length stories, nine shorter stories, a section for class notes, and a section for farewells.
Knowing how many different pieces I needed to place, I then moved on to creating wireframe options for the landing page which would function like the table of contents in the print version.
CONCEPT 1: Image heavy
CONCEPT 2: White space
Two main design concepts were considered for the build of the page. The first option (left) has a large emphasis on imagery, since there are plenty of nice, high quality photos throughout the publication. The second option (right) has a lot more built in whitespace. It still utilizes a decent amount of imagery, but it isn’t as primary of a focus. The right option would also be easier to replicate when building the next issue because it utilized functionality native to our website.
In the end, the client and team chose the option with more whitespace because it allowed the stories to breathe more easily and gave room for more text on the page. They also felt this layout would allow for more of the magazine content to be added.
Creating this magazine digitally also allowed for an archive to be created of the covers over the years. This section allows for alumni to more easily reference the issue and stories they are looking for when contacting the Miamian team. It also now houses all the online issues of the magazine I have built since creating this template.
Once the wireframe was chosen, I then combed through the native files and final print version of the magazine. I worked with the print editor to determine which content was important to bring over digitally, and what could be left out.
To build the stories online, I first looked to the print layouts and used those to inform how the story would lay out digitally. I still wanted to honor the original design when I translated it to the website.
Allowing each story to have it’s own built out page created an even greater opportunity for alumni to connect with the content. Our team could more easily share and promote different stories at different times which helped broaden the reader base of the publication. We have even received thank you messages from older alumni who were unable to read the print version and can now access the content on our website.
With each issue release of Miamian, I build out each new story, replace the current version of the magazine highlighted on our homepage, and move the old one into the archives.