Brand Guidelines Website Redesign
A brand new home for the Johns Hopkins University identity guidelines.
Company
Johns Hopkins University
Responsibilities
Peer Benchmarking
Copywriting
Content Strategy
Wireframing
Information Architecture
Ongoing Website Maintenance
COLLABORATORS
Sr. Director, Brand & Creative
Mission Media (Web Development)
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Johns Hopkins University is among the most trusted brands in the world. Amplifying and protecting this brand is a primary responsibility of the Office of University Communications, in partnership with stakeholders across our divisions, departments, centers, and institutes.
JHU’s brand guidelines website, brand.jhu.edu, hadn’t seen significant updates to its content strategy, visual assets, or user experience since its launch in 2013. After peer benchmarking and stakeholder feedback collection at the beginning of 2024, we determined that an overhaul of the website was necessary to provide a best-in-class resource for our audience of marketing and communications colleagues, administrative professionals, external vendors and media, and more. The website needed to be a resource for designers and non-designers alike.
Making it easy to do the right thing.
One of the primary goals of this redesign was to make it easy for our marketing and communications professionals and affiliates to be on brand. With this in mind, we prioritized the creation of a public-facing download library, an insights and updates blog feed, and a brand showcase to feature projects successfully representing the JHU brand. We also added embedded forms for photography requests, font requests, brand training registrations, and a mailing list sign-up. A critical piece of this site’s success is that we treat it as a living resource, adding and updating guidelines as best practices evolve and our brand ambassadors share new implementations of the brand.
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Brand Guidelines Website Before (Pre-Sept. 2024)
Brand Guidelines Website After (Post-Sept. 2024)
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We took a visual-forward approach to our redesign, with a mission to “show and tell” when it came to our identity and its many applications. The new site features more than 500 images and 30+ new pages of content, addressing the content gaps identified from stakeholder feedback and our content audit.
Outcomes
On top of positive anecdotal feedback post-launch, we’ve seen impressive increases across our analytics data. Looking at the time from launch (Aug. 29, 2024) to the end of year (Dec. 31, 2024), the site had 16,675 active users (up from 12,265 in 2023) and 69,494 page views (up from 30,904 in 2023). The Download Library, a new addition to the site, saw 11,318 views from 3,503 active users.
