Greenfield Community College
Agency: Common Media | Role: Art Direction, Product Design, Copywriting
Additional Credits: Erica Goleman, Development
Additional Credits: Erica Goleman, Development
The Opportunity
Greenfield Community College (GCC) needed to update their home page to kick off a phased rebrand and restructuring project for their entire website. Having just refreshed their core visual identity, they wanted to elevate it to evoke the look and feel of a four-year college, maximizing its appeal to high-performing high school students. The goal of the home page was to provide a sense of community and welcoming that embodied their slogan, "You Belong Here." As the site redesign would be planned in phases, we also needed to work within the parameters of GCC's existing header and footer structure, as well as their existing site architecture.
The Approach
We started by expanding upon GCC's existing typography set with an approachable serif font to provide a more collegiate feel, and rounding out the color palette with more tones found in nature, keeping WCAG compliant contrast in mind. Building upon GCC's existing tree line graphic, we added additional visual devices to help ground the branding, including a honeycomb pattern, both as a nod to GCC's new mascot, Beatrice the Bee, and to illustrate a sense of community and connection.
In addition to a home page layout, we provided a foundational design system of typography, colors, basic components, and starter page layouts that the in-house web developer could implement across the rest of the site. This would act as a stopgap solution until the web team could build a comprehensive design system in a later phase of the full site redesign.
