Two designer positions for the Design Grad Show 2024 were offered to 4th-year students graduating this year who are studying for the Bachelor of Design (Visual Communication) at Western Sydney University.
Position one being the Brand Designer and position 2 being the Digital Designer which I am honoured to be awarded the role for.
Applicants for digital design were tasked to create a rough wireframe along with the technology required to produce the website and the process of uploading student work as part of the proposal.
With such an amazing opportunity to design for your own grad show, there is no doubt that the competition will be tough.
The overall proposal must stand out from grad shows of previous years and ideas from other students.
Websites from previous years all shared the same information architecture, and there is no need to change that since the website is to quite simple, the only difference my proposal had in comparison to previous years is a new holding page for event information, so visitors do not need to externally go to the invitation link to check for dates, time and location of the Grad Show.
I also proposed using Webflow for building the site instead of other website builders or code to design and publish the website, since Webflow allows for more freedom from the design implementation and eliminates the need to involve a development team.
Additionally, the CMS system is a great solution for uploading student work.
The biggest change that was needed was the cards from previous years for the student work, as they only featured the student's name, and not the project name.
Although the grad show's focus is the students, logically only having the project name displayed on the card makes no sense as visitors from the industry to the grad show are here for the student projects, not for the name.
So the final card design features both the student name and project name, with the project name in the higher hierarchy.
With many other design choices aimed towards enhancing the user experience, my proposal was ultimately chosen for WSU's Design Grad Show 2024.
The website will be officially launched on the 27th of November 2024, and I look forward to sharing the final published site, but for now, a prototype will be used for demonstration instead.