SPD has decades of editorial work, competitions, events, and member resources. The site doesn't make any of it easy to find. We restructured how visitors meet it.
We didn't rebrand SPD. We restructured how visitors meet it.
The site felt aimed at insiders. Jargon-heavy categories, overloaded nav, and unclear pathways to membership, jobs, and competitions.
Simplified top-level nav, clearer entry points, and a homepage that orients new visitors. Three core flows prototyped end-to-end.
Same content, better access. Reduce hunting, surface the actions visitors actually came to do, and let SPD's editorial credibility speak.
Strong content. Weak structure. Before talking to users, we audited what the site was already doing. Three artifacts surfaced the recurring pattern.
The site already had everything it needed. It was in the wrong shape. From audit synthesis
Three angles on the same site. We paired user interviews with task analysis so we could compare what users said against what they actually did. Click any card for details.
We used survey and data synthesis to check whether the issues we heard in interviews were showing up more broadly. The patterns lined up — the friction was structural, not anecdotal.
The confusion we heard in interviews wasn't isolated. Users consistently struggled with orientation, navigation, and understanding SPD's value — across roles, career stages, and sessions.
It gave us confidence to focus the redesign on structure and discoverability, not visual polish. Every top-level decision in the new nav traces back to a pattern above.
Five frictions surfaced across interviews and task analysis. Not about polish. About people not understanding what SPD is, where to go, or what they could do once they got there.
I don't know what SPD is yet.
Visitors couldn't articulate what SPD does or who it's for after looking at the homepage. The page assumes you already know.
The navigation is doing too much.
Eight broad top-level entries with sub-categories. People stopped guessing and used the hamburger menu.
Membership value is hidden.
Users couldn't evaluate whether membership was worth it before being asked to pay. They closed the tab.
Strong content, weak structure.
Every interview noted SPD's editorial work as a positive. The same interviews noted that the site made it hard to find that work.
Insider language creates barriers.
Series names like "First Love," "Credits," and "Grids" mean nothing to a new visitor. The site speaks to people who already know SPD.
It took me at least two clicks to find out who SPD are.Senior CTO, tech studio
Their strong points is their content. Their weak points is their organization.Junior designer interview
Each one pointed to a different page that wasn't doing its job.
To quickly understand what SPD does, who it's for, and how to submit work to a competition without getting lost in unfamiliar series names.
Freelance gigs, awards she can put on her portfolio, and a clear breakdown of what membership offers before she pays for it.
An obvious starting point. Student competitions, inspiration, and a sense that publication design is a real career path.
The navigation problem wasn't visual clutter — it was unclear prioritization. Card sorting showed which pages users expected to see together; the sitemap showed where important actions were buried. Together, they reshaped the top nav.
Job Board surfaces as a primary destination instead of a buried link, with persistent Join SPD and Login on the right.
The mobile menu mirrors the desktop nav and exposes the About sub-menu (Membership, Meet the Board, Society Activities, Herb Lubalin Award, Contact) one level down.
"As a student designer, I want a clear starting point, so I can understand where to go without clicking through random sections."
"As a new visitor, I want to quickly understand what SPD is, so I can decide if it feels relevant to me."
"As an active designer, I want to find roles quickly, so I can see whether SPD is useful before committing to membership."
Throwing out compositions on paper, before committing.
These low-fidelity wireframes helped us test layout hierarchy, simplify navigation pathways, and experiment with how users would move through the system before building the final direction.
Same identity. Tighter structure underneath.
Top nav becomes Enter, Join, Browse, About. New content has an obvious home, and visitors don't translate categories before they can act.
Homepage, competition, winner, event, and member tier each get one consistent layout. Yearly updates ship as content, not new design work.
Where the goal is comparison, content sits side by side. Where it's scanning, content breaks into recognizable chunks.
Job board, competitions, and membership are first-class destinations now, not buried links inside a generic Resources section.
For a higher-level client/demo walkthrough of the redesign, we also created a presentation version focused on the final outcomes.
Same content. Better access. The redesign reorganizes SPD's existing value so users can actually find it.
As a student project, this stops at the prototype. The lessons hold.
SPD's site already looks editorial and considered. The problem was structural. Spending design time on the surface would have masked the real issue.
Once the top-level was task-led, the homepage, About, and job board fell into place. The card sort gave us more leverage than any visual exploration.
Usability testing the prototype with real SPD visitors, fleshing out the membership comparison, and turning the recurring page shapes into a small template system.