Harvard

Project Overview:
Website Refresh & CMS for Harvard's First Female President

Partnered with another Senior Designer to design and develop the front-end for a website refresh with content management system for Harvard's first female president, Dr. Drew Gilpin Faust.

Summary:

When Drew Gilpin Faust was inaugurated as Harvard University's 28th president — the first woman to hold the office in the institution's 371-year history — the occasion called for a digital presence equal to the moment. I partnered with a Senior Designer to redesign and develop the president's website front-end alongside a new content management system, creating a platform that was both editorially powerful and administratively flexible.

The goal was a site that reflected the gravitas of the office, the accessibility of President Faust's leadership style, and the forward-looking character of her administration — while giving Harvard's communications staff the tools to manage and publish content independently.

UX Research, Design & Front-End Development:

Working closely with stakeholders from Harvard's communications and web teams, we gathered requirements around content hierarchy, accessibility, and long-term maintainability.

At this point we created UX components to visually articulate our findings:

• Information architecture & site map
• High-fidelity mockups
• Front-end code, built for CMS integration

The design balanced institutional authority with approachability — clean typography, structured layouts, and clear content hierarchy. Rather than a static prototype, the final deliverable was production front-end code, written to hand off directly onto the CMS platform so non-technical staff could independently manage news, speeches, and initiatives from day one.