Scalia Law School Redesigned

Last Friday, we rolled out yet another redesign for Scalia Law School website. This is our third redesign in the past couple of months. Our new dean did not like the previous turquoise color as an overall theme; therefore, we added a gray background to our top head just so we can use white and a bit of gold on our logo.

We made the homepage banners bigger and their new purpose is to attract prospective students. We went a bit crazy with the banners in the previous design. We kept getting requests for new banners for stories that didn’t even warrant to be on our homepage.

We switched from Myriad Pro to Minion 3, both designed by Robert Slimbach, for our headers. Minion 3 Display provides a more contrast to Pelago, also designed by Slimbach.

We brought back the action buttons: visit, request information, and apply. We highlighted our programs: Flex JD, JD, LLM, JM. We expanded our spotlights to showcase our diverse community. We made news and events less dominating.

Basically, we had gone back to where we were before we hired a consultant to change up our homepage. The consultant and our director of communications wanted banners and news on our homepage to take our visitors directly to somewhere else instead of drawing them into our site. These links often take visitors to news outlets that hit the paywalls. As a result, our readers couldn’t read the content. I am glad we’re making the news less prominent on our homepage.

The work hasn’t been done. We still have some tweakings to do. The site has grown so much since I took the reins almost a decade ago. The design had stood the time. I still maintain the main CSS, but we sprinkled inline styles here and there over the years. It is still manageable. I just need to go through and see if they are visually compatible with the new theme. Our next step is to bring more colors to the pages. We’ve gone from too-much colors to neutral gray to back to colors again. I am not complaining as long as I get pay to do.