Ideas, insights and inspirations.

While all .edu websites send important signals and establish vital threads of connection to stakeholders — corporate recruiters, research partners and regional funders/allies — a business school website does so with greater urgency and a far more explicit mandate. We held that truth close as we set about redesigning a new website for the Boler School of Business at John Carroll University, a longstanding pillar of a Cleveland and Northeast Ohio economy that has seen more than its share of challenge and has responded with its distinct brand of resiliency. Through economic cycles of growth and decline, and a steady re-mixing of Cleveland’s regional economy from traditional manufacturing to financial services and, increasingly, medical technology, Boler graduates have provided a steady and reliable source of corporate leadership and entrepreneurial grit. But as is the case with many small and mid-sized colleges, the Boler School of Business struggled to articulate a strategy for strengthening the ties that bind a region’s economy … Continue reading

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The web is full of designs and patterns, both good and bad, new and old. At times it all starts to blur together and the sites start resembling one another. Periodically I like to see what else is out there, to see what interesting ideas have yet to become the web trend of the month. The following is a small list of sites I try to visit at least once a week. As a front end developer I might be looking for something different for inspiration compared to a designer or UX specialist. The following sites will offer not only design and development ideas but also challenge the way we view content on the web, for better or for worse. Site Inspire : Well organized collection so you can easily browse for specific subjects or styles that you are looking for. Mostly leans toward a clean, modern design aesthetic. One Page Love : Single page sites only, great source for … Continue reading

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As the standards bearer of advanced cancer care, the Oncology Nursing Society (ONS) wanted to create a communications platform that positions them as the go-to thought leader in all matters concerning oncology nursing. To realize this goal, Elliance and ONS reinvented their online publication as an always-on, always-fresh news, views and advocacy engine, called ONS Voice. The ONS Voice includes three key innovations: First, a proprietary tagging system was developed that automatically groups the most popular articles and advocacy issues into trending topics. Second, keywords were “baked” into all articles to elevate their rankings on Google. And finally, smart forms of advertising opportunities were created to make the magazine self-sustaining and drive revenue. This association magazine website design incorporates all the learnings and smarts of the Carnegie Mellon Today university magazine we had launched last year i.e. mobile-first simplicity, stories juiced by SEO keywords, deepening of the brand, and optimal integration of digital and print. However, we went a little … Continue reading

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In December of 2016, Slate.com started testing a new article site design. One of their designers Jason Santa Maria tweeted their test page, along with a  blog post introducing the new design approach. The new layout was sleek and simple, but I was personally drawn towards the articles hero image and title. The hero section refers to the top section of the page, usually with a large eye catching image and title. I wanted to talk about section and some of the smart design decisions that were made by Slate when thinking and designing ‘mobile first’. For publications like Slate, mobile traffic makes up a majority of their page views, so focusing on this experience is an obvious choice. Traditionally, the standard hero image is usually wider than it is tall to match the aspect ratio of the desktop device. This ‘desktop first’ approach when scaled to a mobile screen size through responsive development yields a rather short image that … Continue reading

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Anyone who has ever suffered through a migraine knows the symptoms: headache, distorted vision, irritability, dizziness, nausea, etc. Anyone who has ever gone through a website content migration has probably experienced some of these same symptoms. Whether we all like it or not, in the world of digital media content migration is a necessary evil. Actually, strike that, it is a necessary good. Without the ability to perform a migration, all content would have to be manually copied from the current content management system (CMS) or entered manually into the new system. As with migraines, the key to a headache-free migration is prevention. The most important preventative steps are to understand: how your content is represented in the source system; how you would like it represented in the destination system; and how you will you need to process or transform the content while moving it. Once you have defined these three points in detail, you have essentially defined your migration path. We recently … Continue reading

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In our 20+ year history of building websites, almost all our clients were initially skeptical about the return on investment from a website redesign; they underestimated the impact the new website would have on their business. After a year or two of relaunch, almost all the clients became believers. They shared comments with us that had three recurring themes. Here they are: 1. A great website creates a strategic inflection point, whereby a business starts experiencing a major change due to clarity realized during the website strategy development process. 2. A great website changes organizational trajectory, when a business sheds an old skin and puts on a new skin which re-energizes the prospects, customers and internal stakeholders. 3. A great website realizes a new organizational destiny, whereby the organization musters the courage to unapologetically pursue its vision. We often hear stories from skeptical prospects about their previous website redesigns not liberating prosperity. What’s the difference between their past experiences and … Continue reading

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My last blog post I wrote about the future of web grids by using CSS Grid Layouts. Recently I have been finding a lot of inspiration off of the grid. Finding a way to incorporate some more organic or random elements on the page. Over the weekend I visited the home page for one of my favorite photography social media and mobile app called VSCO  and was surprised to see a very unorthodox homepage (figure 1, 2, and 3) The site looks normal at first glance, a simple nav and a list of recent blog posts, but on hover (at large desktop sizes) the post items will load images from the post behind the text in a somewhat random order and position.   The interiors are more structured (figure 4) but still give the appearance of a random placement for images and text. It is easy to keep the web in a grid structure using frameworks like Bootstrap, Foundation, or … Continue reading

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This past June several Elliance team members had the pleasure of attending Web Design Day 2016. While many of the speakers presented interesting new ideas and techniques one seemed to stand out of the crowd for me, Jen Simmons’ ‘Revolutionize Your Page: Real Art Direction on the Web’. Her talk focused on upcoming web standards that will have great impact on how we design and develop web page layouts. You can watch a similar talk here. One of the most exciting features she covered was CSS Grid Layouts. What is a CSS Grid Layout? It is a browser native feature for making 2 dimensional grids on the web. In the past, after the introduction of CSS, we used tables to create layouts, this was followed by the use of floated elements and most recently we’ve been dabbling in flexbox. Of course CSS Grid Layouts are not ready for production, but Chrome, Firefox, and Opera are testing this new standard that you can use today (after … Continue reading

As a Front End developer, my job crosses over many disciplines, but this post is not about what a Front End developer/designer does (you can read a great article by Brad Frost on the topic to understand more about this balancing act). During the development of a web site, the front end plays key roles throughout the process. Traditionally the front end was reserved for the post-design states of a project, but more and more, we are seeing the front end discussed and thought about earlier. Depending on the organization or team, the front end can be introduced as early as the beginnings of content strategy, site map development, or wireframing. These early front ends are usually grayscale websites with placeholder images and Lorem Ipsum text. The ‘polishing’ of a site with elements like color, drops shadows, gradients, and animations are usually reserved for later. But recently I have found myself adding more and more motion throughout all stages of … Continue reading

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Experiencing the power of computers used to mean being tethered to desktop “towers” or large clunky “lap”tops. Now that same power sits in your pocket, or it is wrapped around your wrist. In the last decade, computers have continued to get smaller, cheaper, and faster. And this trend isn’t slowing down as computing power is moving into other areas. We now have the Internet of Things and the power to connect to TVs, household appliances, locks, garage doors, lights, and a number of other devices. We have systems that monitor our furnace and the air quality of our house. It’s amazing. But as amazing as this hardware is, the real power lies in the software powering these devices. That is where the magic actually happens. It’s the software that gives us access to these devices. Think about all of the things that we can do now because of the software. Here are a few to get you thinking. You can: … Continue reading