A PHILANTHROPY WEBSITE BASED ON BRAIN SCIENCE

I led the redesign process and worked with cross-functional team to build two language versions of the TCCI website, support ongoing marketing activities and design marketing collateral and publications.
Responsibilities: Lead Design

About TCCI

TCCI was founded with a U.S. $1 billion philanthropic commitment from Shanda’s founders in late 2016 to help advance brain science.

Branding

In contrast to Shanda, TCCI’s brand is relatively new so deciding how to position and market the brand was the first thing we were working on. Neuroscience is the main focus for this philanthropy, so we wanted to have an element of this in the brand, therefore we used the asterisk to represent the firing of a synapse in the brain. We then designed brand guidelines to make sure everything is consistently applied. On this project I played a coordinating role with our PR and design agencies.

Logo

Colors

Typography

Photography - Technology & Future

Photography - Scientists & Researchers

Refresh The Websites

The Chinese and English TCCI websites were launched several years back so we decided to refresh the websites, both optimizing the layout and improving the user experience. We first studied our Google Analytics’ report to understand usage patterns across the site. Then we listed the pages on which we wanted users to stay longer and figured out how to optimize content and user experience to increase users’ stay.

Here are the main changes we made to the site.

  1. Images – We used more compelling images, both replacing existing photgraphy as well as flat color areas. We kept the images as close to the original color tone as possible.
  2. Extension - We took out the side navigation/ category on most of the pagesand replaced the dropdown list in the category for the News and Event pages and extended the reading area from 2/3 columns to 3/3 columns so users would focus on the message we want to deliver without scrolling too much.
  3. Unify - We unified the way we present our professors, news, and events, so users can quickly scan and find what they are looking for, instead of reading unrelated content.

With our analysis done and our design philosophy complete, I started to work on the new design and presented the comparisons to the teams.

The Old website

The New Concept

Front End Development with Developers + SEO + Google Analytics

Once we received feedback and finalized the designs, it was time to move on to development. I made rapid prototypes and generated CSS code for developers’ convenience. I also updated our Google Analytics implementation to track the website traffic performance and optimize the website later. I also implemented keywords to both the web pages and images in order to achieve better SEO. The website was built on the WordPress platform.

Prototype

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Lead Designer

BRANDING WEBSITE FOR AN INNOVATIVE ORGANIZATION WITH A GREAT HISTORY

As the first and only inhouse designer at Shanda in the United States, I worked directly with Shanda’s founders and was responsible for designing, building and maintaining the websites for Shanda and its subsidiary companies. I worked with the PR team and managed outside design agencies to create and maintain a company design system.
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