AIGA, the pro­fes­sion­al asso­ci­a­tion for design, serves more than 16,000 design­ers through nation­al activ­i­ties and local pro­grams devel­oped by 55 chap­ters and more than 150 stu­dent groups. Through­out their careers, design­ers turn to the orga­ni­za­tion and its web­site to exchange ideas and infor­ma­tion, par­tic­i­pate in pas­sion­ate crit­i­cal analy­sis, and advance edu­ca­tion and eth­i­cal practice.

Seek­ing to reach new audi­ences in an emerg­ing gen­er­a­tion of broad­ly-defined design­ers (includ­ing web and inter­ac­tion design­ers and user expe­ri­ence pro­fes­sion­als), AIGA asked us to redesign its web­site, hous­ing more than a decade of rich, deep con­tent, mem­ber­ship areas, mag­a­zine sec­tions, and more.

Bring the content to the user

Our first big design deci­sion was to com­plete­ly jet­ti­son the sites struc­ture. In its place, we fash­ioned a more coher­ent and more empow­er­ing user expe­ri­ence that brought con­tent to the sur­face instead of forc­ing vis­i­tors to dig for it. Ideas trump nav­i­ga­tion; read­ing is bet­ter than search­ing. Read­ers became writ­ers through the sites inter­ac­tive offer­ings and fol­lowed con­tent streams that mat­tered to them via RSS and tax­on­o­my-pow­ered con­tex­tu­al links.

Rotating mastheads from the AIGA Design Archives

Only after deliv­er­ing this opti­mal user expe­ri­ence archi­tec­ture were we ready to over­haul the sites look and feel, bring­ing its typog­ra­phy to a qual­i­ty lev­el wor­thy of a revered design asso­ci­a­tion and rem­i­nis­cent of print.

To top it all off, we allowed AIGAs design archives to visu­al­ly (and dynam­i­cal­ly) intrude at the top of every page.

The intru­sion func­tioned as a sec­ond nar­ra­tive: each page of the site was about what­ev­er it hap­pened to be about, but it also invit­ed design­ers to dive into the archives for pure visu­al inspiration.

Partners in progress

Third­wave cre­at­ed the mag­nif­i­cent back-end archi­tec­ture that pow­ered AIGA.org. AIGAs Ric Gref, Denise Wood, Liz Danz­i­co, and Kel­ly McLaugh­lin were bril­liant col­lab­o­ra­tor­sas one would expect. (The mer­cu­r­ial Liz Danz­i­co lat­er joined us as an infor­ma­tion archi­tect, before leav­ing to direct the MFA Inter­ac­tion Design pro­gram at New Yorks School of Visu­al Art­sa pro­gram she cofound­ed with Steven Heller.)

Our team was respon­si­ble for over­all design strat­e­gy, infor­ma­tion archi­tec­ture, brand design and con­sult­ing, graph­ic design, user inter­face design, user expe­ri­ence design, and front-end cod­ing, includ­ing the devel­op­ment, test­ing, and deliv­ery of CSS/HTML templates.