In today’s fast-paced and highly competitive world of higher education, standing out from the crowd is more important than ever. One way to achieve this is through original design that is truly unique to you. From an agency perspective, original design is essential in creating a distinctive brand identity that will resonate with your target audience and set you apart from your competitors.

The Importance of Original Design

Original design is critical to creating a strong brand identity that communicates your values and vision effectively. It helps you establish an authentic voice that resonates with your target audience and makes a lasting impression. Unique design can also play a critical role in driving engagement and building trust, as it demonstrates your commitment to excellence and attention to detail.

However, creating an original design is not easy. With so many institutions vying for attention, it can be challenging to come up with something truly unique. How do you avoid the same generic marketing designs to stand out in a sea of sameness? How do you push the envelope creatively without alienating your audience? With the right approach, it is possible to create designs that are truly original and reflect your unique identity.

Five Tips for Creating Original Design in Higher Education

• Understand your audience.

The first step in creating an original design is to understand your audience. You need to know who you are targeting and what their needs and desires are. Conducting research and gathering insights into your target audience’s behavior and preferences can help you create designs that resonate with them.

• Define your unique identity: Authenticity is key.

You need to know what makes your institution different from your competitors and what values and qualities you want to communicate through your design. This can involve creating a brand strategy that outlines your institution’s unique value proposition, tone of voice, and key messaging. Above all, you need to be authentic to who you are.

• Collaborate with creative professionals.

Partnering with experienced designers, writers, and other creatives can help you develop concepts that push boundaries and challenge conventions. They can also help bring your unique identity to life through visual and written storytelling.

• Embrace innovation.

Don’t be afraid to experiment with new approaches, techniques, and technologies. This can involve exploring new design trends, experimenting with new mediums, or leveraging emerging technologies like augmented reality or virtual reality to create immersive experiences. These are all things that will help you stand out from your competitors.

• Iterate and refine.

Creating original design is an iterative process. It takes time to develop concepts that truly capture your unique identity and resonate with your audience. Therefore, it is essential to iterate and refine your designs based on feedback from your target audience and other stakeholders. This can involve conducting user testing, focus groups, or surveys to gather insights that inform your design decisions; then you can refine that information through your core working group.

In conclusion, original design is critical to creating a distinctive and authentic brand identity in higher education. With the right approach, it can help you stand out from the crowd and drive engagement and growth in a highly competitive landscape.

In today’s digital age, websites have become the face of higher education institutions for many prospective and current students, faculty, and alumni. It’s essential for universities and colleges to have a website that is not only functional, but also visually appealing. Good higher ed website design is crucial for many reasons, including creating a positive user experience, building a solid brand identity, and improving conversion rates. A well-designed website will also bring your brand’s mission, values, and messaging to life for its users.

What are some best practices to follow when designing or redesigning a higher ed website? For starters, focusing on a few core foundations, such as user-centered design, storytelling, web accessibility, and mobile responsiveness, will all contribute to a more engaging user experience. 

User-Centered Design

As the digital landscape continues to grow, user experience (UX) has become a vital aspect of website design. It’s no longer enough to simply create a website that looks good. To be successful, websites must be easy to use, intuitive, and meet the needs of the people who use them. That’s where user-centered design comes in.

Storytelling

With so many higher education websites out there, it can be difficult to stand out. Storytelling is a powerful tool that can make your higher ed website design more engaging and memorable. 

Incorporating storytelling into your website’s design can create an emotional connection with your audience, build trust, and communicate your brand message in a way that is both entertaining and informative. 

By telling a unique and engaging story through visual design, photography, and copywriting, you can set your higher ed brand apart from the competition and create a strong impression with your audience.

User-centered design is a design approach that puts the needs and wants of users at the forefront of the design process. It takes into account the users’ goals, motivations, and behaviors to create a website that is tailored to their needs. Prioritizing the user experience will ensure that your site is easy to navigate and understand, providing a more satisfying and enjoyable experience for users, which makes it more likely they will stay on the site longer and engage with it more. 

Accessible Web Content

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) are a set of internationally recognized guidelines for making websites accessible to people with disabilities. It includes areas like color contrast, functional images, and font usage hierarchies. By following these guidelines, you can ensure that your website is usable and accessible to a wider audience, which can improve the user experience for everyone who visits your site.

An additional benefit of following WCAG is that it improves your website’s Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Websites that are accessible to people with disabilities are often easier for search engines to crawl and index. This means that your website may be more likely to appear at the top of search engine results, which can help you reach more potential visitors.

Mobile-Responsive Strategy

With the increasing number of people using mobile devices to browse the web, a higher ed website design that is mobile-responsive has become a necessity for higher education sites. 

A responsive website is designed to adjust its layout and content to the size of the user’s screen, providing an optimal viewing and navigation experience on any device. Wise design strategies for all page elements, such as responsive grids, font sizes, fluid images, and device breakpoints, are critical parts of the design process.

There are numerous benefits to using an effective mobile-responsive strategy with your higher education website, including an improved user experience, increased reach, and better SEO and conversion rates.

In Conclusion

Incorporating user-centered design, storytelling, web accessibility, and mobile responsiveness into higher ed website design creates a valuable investment for any higher education institution looking to stand apart and above in today’s crowded digital landscape.

Behind every successful advertising campaign is a landing page that is designed with one thing in mind: a conversion. And like most things marketing related, there’s an art and a science to designing a higher ed landing page. 

We’ve dissected our most successful landing pages and found six principles to help you design the perfect landing page for your program or department.

Design for Focus

Like marketing campaigns and advertising messages, landing pages should be designed with one focus or goal. As you’re planning the page, be precise when defining the one goal you want users to complete once they hit your page. Remember, your marketing efforts are already competing with more than 7,000 competing marketing messages. The more potential actions we give a visitor to our page, the more distraction we create on top of an already distracting web experience.

Structure Your Page

Understanding information hierarchy and user flow can turn a good landing page into a much more effective landing page. The goal is to develop a landing page experience that is appealing and aligns with our natural flow of reading online.

First, start with the structure of the page. What are the most important messages, actions and visuals components you need to meet your goals? Once you’ve listed them, order them in a way that makes sense with your campaign goals. Below, we’ve mapped out sample landing page components that highlight a typical hierarchy of information.

When it comes to headlines and subheadlines, there’s a typical pattern to how users will read each layer of copy. Consider each line and build a narrative that aligns your ad to landing page. In our first illustration, we’ve sketched out how this would look.

Next, consider the two primary reader flows: The “Z” and the “F” patterns. If your page needs to be copy heavy, the “F” flow provides a natural experience. Most often, visitors will start at the top left of the page, scan right and then down the left side of the page until a component stops their scan.

The “Z” pattern considers how readers engage with a page with more visual elements and less copy. Creating components that alternative styles creates a more pleasant user experience.

Create Consistency

While campaign landing pages are often developed on the periphery of brand work or outside of your website, it shouldn’t be a completely different experience for the user. Successful landing pages account for the entire campaign ecosystem as well as the entirety of the customer journey. 

To be clear, campaign landing pages should be consistent with your paid media and your owned assets–your website. We’ve covered the importance of aligning your advertising with your landing page–the same can be said for your website. 

Why? Our brains were designed for pattern recognition and we process visuals (i.e. design) much faster than messages. Message alignment is important, but visual consistency instills a sense of confidence and relevancy-removing user dissonance. 

When designing your higher ed landing pages, pull in brand guidelines as well as ad design elements. You don’t need to incorporate 100 percent of the ad, but purposeful elements such as images, color palette, button design, etc.

Highlight Benefits

Humans naturally seek confirmation. When we’ve expressed interest in something – let’s say clicking on an ad – we want our rationale for interest to be proven correct. 

Part of the confirmation is that the benefit matches the user’s interest. And the quickest way to express the benefit of your product or service is visually. This isn’t to downplay the importance of copy, it is just that our brain can process visual cues much quicker – meaning emotions, brand cues and end user. 

Typically the hero image is the first component a user experience. The hero image should be attention-grabbing but not at the sacrifice of clarity. A good test is to remove all copy and see if you can still understand what the page is about. 

When it comes to the image, research would suggest that people-focus hero images are more effective than product shots or illustration. The use of real people tends to be more memorable and elicit emotion more effectively. Start with emotions and map them to the aspirations of your audience.

Optimize for Attention

When it comes to designing for action, designers have a few tools that create a direct path to what we want the user to do. The first is to use colors in a way that calls attention to elements. For example, to highlight buttons use a mix of contrasting colors. In the example below, we’ve chosen a color that contrasts with the overall theme of the landing page to quickly draw attention to it.

Negative space can also create an environment that forces focus on one specific element. Negative space is a useful tool for benefit-driven copy and buttons. Almost immediately a visitor to the page is pulled to the copy on the left.

Finally, use images to drive the users’ attention. Research using eye-tracking technology routinely shows the impact of the human gaze. We tend to follow eye lines and direct our attention in reference to where someone is looking. The strategic use of a person’s gaze can place the focus on a button or line of copy.

Build Trust

Social proof is one of the most vastly studied heuristics – or cognitive biases. Humans have a powerful desire to fit in and the quickest way to learn a behavior is to observe the crowd. Testimonials on landing pages is a common but effective practice.

When planning on placement of testimonials remember that they are important for reinforcing a user’s beliefs about a product or service. To help, include personal details that make the message more relatable and credible. Reflex words and emotions that are natural and mirror your audience’s.

Set a Strong Foundation from the Beginning

A few additional housekeeping items to ensure you’ve built a solid foundation for your users. Make sure the page is mobile friendly. This means cut down on extraneous copy and make sure what’s above-the-fold is a positive user experience. Second, make sure your page load times are short. A few things you can do to keep your load times down are to optimize your images and video for the web, cache your web pages and minimize your pages code. Use Google’s Test My Site tool to find out how your page scores.

Finally, don’t reinvent the wheel. If you’ve found success previously, pull in past learning or design elements. A new campaign doesn’t necessarily mean you need a newly designed landing page.