Under the Hood at AIGA.org

Mar 20 2007

The still-fresh, brand spankin’ new relaunch of AIGA.org has had a lot of well-deserved press around the web. The Happy Cog crew did a hell of a job.

I’ve been fortunate enough to have now been involved in the design processes of two major AIGA redesigns in different capacities. The first time around when Flat redesigned the national website, I worked under Behavior with Khoi Vinh to come up with designs for the Design Forum. This time around, I was again, fortunate to be pulled in to work on the AIGA redesign, but not on the public-facing website, but rather under the hood and behind the scenes on AIGA.org’s CMS interface.

Working with Liz Danzico and Kelly McLaughlin at AIGA and with Matthew Spellman, Tonja Bruns and Orin Fink at Thirdwave (who created and customized the CMS), I developed the look and feel for what the people at AIGA see when they update that oh so sexy front-end.

With the blessing of AIGA, I’ve been able to share these.

The information architecture work of Matthew Spellman at Thirdwave was instrumental in these designs.

Note: Always get a good IA on your team.

These are the five base templates for the most complex parts of the site that require a rich visual language and which all other parts of the site are modeled after.

Click on an image to see a properly scaled page.