The Department of Graphic Design and Advertising (GDAD) at the School of Visual Arts presented me with a fairly open brief for the creation of their website, from which I derived 3 concrete goals:

1. 1) The quality content of this site was quickly identified as student work, which made the first priority to showcase the high quality, breadth and diversity of student work.

1. 2) The site should embody the ethos of the Department, which I took to be limit-pushing, risk-taking, avant-garde, smart, sophisticated, and always with a high production quality.

1. 3) The site must stay fresh with the regular addition of student work. The site should scale easily, adding new content must be easy.

The student work gallery launched with over 3,000 images of student and alumni work, each image organized by category and project, and further identified by student name, title, description, instructor, etc. To achieve this functionality, the website integrates with a digital asset management system, which ensures the site will scale easily and its image content will be easy to manage.

The site also houses PLAYSPACE, an experimental art gallery that reimagines the traditional gallery experience for a purely digital space. It experiments with new ways of showing artwork by leveraging several unique characteristics of digital space that are simply not available to a traditional gallery experience - such the ability to rotate objects, interact with objects and contain a near infinite number of objects.

The design employs a CMYK color scheme both as a way of paying homage to the Department's print-based roots as well as to push the envelope by taking CMYK into digital space. In addition to giving the site a fresh, unique and bold look, the color scheme is also semantic - each color signifies a type of element: Cyan = link, Magenta = title, Yellow = image/multimedia, Black = text.