Inspired by Dialogue
A Design System That’s Easy on the Eye
A Light Touch
An Outward Facing Core Message
Messaging Built on Core Principles
Clear & Concise Copywriting
A Place for Everything
A Hero Ready for Action
The topmost section of the Homepage (referred to as the “Hero” section) is designed to surface both upcoming and evergreen actions that site visitors can take. Because HxA is frequently promoting activities and events to members as well as reaching out to potential new members, this component was designed and built to feature new content and make updates and changes quick and easy.
A Deep Dive Minimalism Experience
The experience of the site is one of minimalism that allows for deeper exploration. Copy is succinct on primary landing pages and more dense on pages where a more in-depth approach is required. This helps site visitors easily get a high-level understanding of what’s available on the site and to dig in where they like.
Facilitating Growth & Discovery
New students and faculty join college campuses each year. As they do, HxA wants it to be easy for them to find the local HxA Campus Community. Our solution was to design and develop an interactive map on the Campus Community Network page that shows all of the existing communities.
Initially viewed in an expanded view to show current communities across the US, Canada, and beyond, this scalable map feature automatically zooms into selected areas and allows site visitors to surface information about the HxA Campus Community at each location.
Heterodox Academy
Heterodox Academy (HxA) started out as a blog for social researchers in academia. Today, their membership extends across the US, Canada, and around the world, and represents nearly every academic discipline. They conduct and publish research and academic thinking about the negative impact a lack of ideological diversity has had on the quality of research within their disciplines.
Having organically grown into a site with well over a thousand pages, the HxA team needed a cohesive brand extension and new information architecture that provides easy access to their extensive treasure trove of articles, reports, resources, videos, and podcasts. The site also had to serve as a digital hub for the HxA community and to inform funders about the organization’s impact.
HxA’s new digital and media hub is a tremendous resource for students, faculty, and administrators in higher education. It’s a welcoming place that provides an abundance of information. It also serves as an organizational platform for over three dozen HxA Campus Communities at colleges and universities across the US and Canada, more than two dozen virtual communities worldwide, as well as in-person and online events.
Multiple pathways exist for people to find information that interests them. From distinct sections on the Homepage to a two-tiered navigation system, and links throughout the site, people are free to take their preferred route during their exploration of the HxA hub.
We drew inspiration from HxA’s existing wordmark to build some of the visual elements. As a hint at positive dialogue, we use speech bubbles as a common theme. They are used as accents in different shapes along with photo containers that hint at spoken dialogue.
Through our mood board process, we decided to use bright colors on white and cream backgrounds to infuse the site with energy that keeps the serious subject matter approachable.
The site is mostly white to encourage people to scroll through the content rich experience. To separate sections we used lines and color blocks so that the eye has a clear sense of when to rest and understand content that is intentionally grouped together.
We took an unusual approach with buttons, having them be open rather than solid to maintain the lightness of the site. We used a large size and animations on hover to draw attention to the buttons, while keeping the experience clean.
There is minimal iconography on the site. We took a simple approach using rounded shapes that align with the approachable visual aesthetic of the brand.
Heterodox Academy is focused more on their communities than on themselves. As a result their brand narrative is laid out using four simple message components.
Everything HxA does is in service to advancing the principles of open inquiry, viewpoint diversity, and constructive disagreement. These core principles inform everything they do. Our job was to help them express these as succinctly as possible.
The tone of the content we developed with the HxA team is elevated without feeling overly academic. While we are explaining big ideas, the language used is clear and accessible with minimal jargon.
With hundreds of pages covering 12 issue areas across multiple media types, the site required careful planning to allow for easy access. Creating a site map was invaluable to the process and helped us be certain that every item on the site had a home.
