Understanding the institution before forming opinions about the site

Led by Miranj, we conducted a week-long discovery workshop on campus with CEPT’s website committee. This helped in defining the website goals and target audience, and order both based on priority.

Clean, classy, a little avant-garde but not frivolous. Bold, with ample white space.

Design Approach

The brief guides us toward a clean, editorial aesthetic: strong grids, varied image scale, generous white space, a single accent colour used sparingly, with typography that’s strong but pared down. We pulled references to extract those principles before moving into visual design.

We took a modular approach: in the first phase, we created templates featuring key content that could later serve as the foundation for patterns and components throughout the site.

Faculty pages that work as microsites

With all the content present and accessible from the faculty page, it functions like a microsite within the larger website.

Programme depth without overwhelming the page

The program structure on all program pages is designed to communicate CEPT’s academic programs in great depth and detail. The structure is flexible enough to work across any programs, regardless of the number of semesters or courses.

The website also answers questions about what students and their families expect from their life at CEPT.

Celebration of People

People are at the core of CEPT University. The new design has a shiny new profile page that celebrates their work and invites collaboration.

Community Outreach

CEPT hosts events, including exhibitions, talks, seminars, open to everyone in the local community.

Tags connected to live filters

On most institutional sites, tags are cosmetic. Here every tag links to a filtered index, with the page title confirming what you're looking at. Visitors can follow threads across the site rather than hitting dead ends.

Mobile designed alongside desktop

We ran desktop and mobile design tracks simultaneously to make real decisions about hierarchy at every screen size — important for a site most prospective students will encounter on a phone.

All your best bars are my typos!

Throughout this project, we explored multiple directions before committing to anything. Every direction that didn’t make it helped sharpen the ones that did.

Here are some of the iterations and rejected ideas that could probably form another project altogether.

Outcome

With a new website and a scalable content system in place, CEPT has a solid foundation that should serve them for the good part of the next decade.

We intended to infuse some calibrated chaos to the visual design and hope that soon we might be able to take up a small enhancement that reflects the energetic pace of a student’s experience.