The International Society for Technology in Education is an organization that creates the standards for learning, teaching, and leading in the digital age, providing a comprehensive roadmap for the effective use of technology in schools worldwide. Grounded in learning science research and based on practitioner experience, the ISTE Standards ensure that using technology for learning can create high-impact, sustainable, scalable and equitable learning experiences for all learners.
The ISTE team approached Viget with a need for a new website to coincide with their annual conference. This new website needed updated IA, content strategy, as well as an updated visual identity to make them look like a leader in technology in the classroom.
Team
Viget
Role
Research
Strategy
Branding
Interactive Design
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Free Content: Attract and retain audiences by serving and adding value.
02.
Paid Content: Make it easy for audiences to access, find, and buy our products/offerings.
03.
Community: Hone in on our identity as a membership association, improve member experience, and begin generating more revenue.
04.
Homepage & Navigation: Communicate our brand, serve/add value to our audiences, and make it easy for them to engage.
05.
Social Proof: Highlight our role as an/the industry leader with - among other things - an “ISTE-Approved” page/section promoting certification, awards, and seal of alignment.
Discovery
We conducted a brand interview to understand what makes ISTE special and why educators look to them specifically for guidance and support. What we learned is that there was a huge disconnect between how ISTE and educators perceive the organization and the execution of their brand. A quick visit to ISTE.org told that story pretty clearly.
However, something unexpected came up in these interviews that we didn’t latch onto until the middle of the visual design phase. The ISTE team pointed to their annual conference, ISTE Live, as a representation of the energy and sense community that they foster. After watching videos of the energy, innovation, and experimentation happening at conference itself, is when things really started to clicked.
Visual Strategy
After discovery, we decided to create three distinct conceptual directions of what the new site could look like, each with their own strategy based off of our discovery findings.
Direction One
Unlocking Potential
Not everyone in the ISTE community stays up-to-date on the latest trends in education. We create a welcoming environment for creative and future-focused strategies that give educators the tools and training to propel their students and themselves ahead of the curve.
Direction Two
Ready to Innovate
ISTE is a vibrant community of educators with even more vibrant classrooms of students. This community comes to ISTE for our high standard of expert insights that keeps their classrooms abuzz with curious students and educators that challenge them to take their education to the next level.
Direction Three
The Trusted Standard
ISTE a thought-leader on all topics when it comes to technology in the classroom. Educators do not come here for an answer, they come here for the answer.
Visual Design
The ISTE team chose our second concept, but without the big shapes. The loved the energy and excitement that it inspired and how it both represented the classroom and ISTE’s educators. We built on this idea a little further by introducing some new elements to make the design a little more playful, but still cutting edge.
By adding in more photos of both students and educators, this design does a great job of showing not only the community, but does a great job of communicating what ISTE does right off the bat.
Grains & Gradients
When working with the ISTE brand, we found that couldn’t combine most of their brand colors due to accessibility and readability concerns. In working through the design system, we learned is that we could use these vibrant colors to create interesting gradients and we could further soften the forms with grain and grid lines, all of which tie themselves to the original concept by representing the dynamic learning environment through grit and grids.
Fail early. Fail often. I love the “Tell us about a time you failed,” question in interviews. I love failure. You get honest reactions to failure and learn so much from it. We were overly ambitious at the start of the project and first showed the client homepage designs. A huge mistake, sure, with a lot of feedback to boot, but it allowed us to further refine our designs, put the homepage on pause, and implement the feedback on page with much lower stakes to retest the waters before we applied the feedback back to the homepage design.
