Limestone Media
Limestone Media is a nonprofit magazine presenting the stories of local writers about the goings-on of their community to create unity between residents and the county. The client was interested in adding a local news element under their umbrella and the ServeIT team was tasked with how to integrate this element. I served as a Co-Lead on this team, as well as having the responsibility of being the client contact where I organized our biweekly meetings and kept the client appraised of our progress as well as any problems.
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Overview
Timeline: January 2024 - April 2024
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Role: Co-Lead, Client Contact
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Constraints: Worked exclusively in Figma due to unforeseen issues with client's current website set up
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My Takeaways
Working on this team allowed me to guide an intern who came in with a Biology perspective and show them aspects of the design process
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Being the client contact helped me gain organizational skills pertinent to productive meetings through presentation, tech set-up, and agendas.
The Scoop
We started with an overview of the website and while the site itself had a personality and was functional, their navigation was extensive and not always intuitive. We had to dig through the subcategories as opposed to finding them where we thought they would be. We delved into the navigation deeper while completing our sitemap in Figma, which also helped us see several repeat categories. The site was actually already more suited towards daily news than a magazine based on their layout. The team's confusion with the current navigation gave us the idea to do some preliminary user tests and test the navigation with others. We also decided to test users not only with Limestone's current site, but also test them with other combined news and magazine sites to see how a user would be able to navigate between their daily news and magazine.
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From there we did some competitor analysis to see how other news/magazine sites handle displaying their different types of content. The team created a sort of vision board with the elements we liked the best from these kinds of sites. We hoped the results of the user tests and competitor analysis would give the client insight to inform their decision about whether to keep everything on one site, or create individual landing pages for each type of content. Based on our results and a couple discussions, they decided to have separate landing pages under one umbrella site.
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We encouraged this idea as the company had one print version of their magazine that was everything a magazine should be. It was artsy, with personality, with contrasting colors and featured images. It was more creative than a daily news site is expected to be, and as creative as a magazine was expected to be. We took the majority of our inspiration from this magazine for our style guide, including the color scheme for the whole brand, both types of content included. ​
The print magazine used white and a deep blue, so those were the new main colors of the Limestone Media websites. By using the same colors for daily news and magazine, we aimed to create brand cohesion. We used the same colors as the two types of content belonged to the same company, but we used them in different ways to separate the different types of content. The magazine was showcased as cards in a gallery on a blue background, the daily news kept a white background with a typical column layout, like a web version of the top fold of a newspaper. We tried to keep the fonts looking classic and professional, to try and convey that the content is reputable and upstanding.
One of the biggest challenges I faced with my team was the unexpected turn of working solely in Figma for the semester. Typically we work directly on client websites but due to the inner workings of their current site, it was determined that it would be best if we worked in Figma only and let them transfer the designs as they were able. This made us cognizant of creating easily replicated designs for their Wordpress site.
Extra! Extra! Read All About It
Website Homepage
News Landing Page
Magazine Article Page
Magazine Landing Page
Sports Article (new category)
Sports Layout (new category)