From paper to pixels
Challenge
Queens Alumni Review As a print publication, Queen’s Alumni Review is constrained to ink and parchment; a linear experience inherently limited in terms of interactivity. As an e-zine, we saw an opportunity to elevate QAR’s content with a platform that marries its reader’s insatiable appetite for high-quality content with all the advantages the web has to offer. There’s no question the magazine’s print content was stunning, with editorial grids and blocks of text and imagery throughout its pages. However, these layouts didn’t lend themselves to digital. We needed a solution that kept the newly elevated design front and centre while working within the constraints of the responsive web.
Solution
The discovery that Queen’s Alumni Review was not reliant on ad space was music to the ears of our designers. In the world of digital publication, the layout of content is often secondary to the placement of ads, leading to designs that necessitate scrolling through ads, deteriorating both the value of the content and the user experience. Queen’s Alumni Review does not have to contend with these space constraints, allowing our designers the freedom to create what Design Lead Steven refers to as “a more pure way of displaying content that accentuates the absolute core of the brand.” The result is high-quality content presented with graphics and a smooth layout that compliment the subject matter, creating a cohesive and unrivalled reading experience, whether reading on a computer or mobile device.Our design team adapted the magazine’s layout, retaining the text-block aesthetic and ensuring Queen’s brand was meaningfully sustained across both print and digital, beyond just colour schemes and logos. We’re talking dynamic, contextual content, buttery smooth animations, and high-res images that bring QARs content to life like never before. An intuitive navigation, paired with a robust site search and manageable content categorization offer a seamless user experience for readers. Guidelines for ongoing tagging and categorization by Queen’s internal team were also provided to ensure consistency over time.
Results
With the site’s information architecture and visual design complete, our development team went to work on the website’s technical infrastructure. Not unlike many higher education institutions, Queen’s Alumni Review was set on maintaining its Drupal back-end, a platform made famous for its intuitive authoring experience, flexibility, and robust governance tools and workflows. Developing the site in a modular fashion allowed Queen’s team the flexibility needed to grow its digital ezine without compromising its newly established design system. And, as with all Massive’s website design and development projects, the new site was built to adhere to WCAG (web accessibility) best practices, ensuring an intuitive and seamless user experience for everyone. Additionally, our development team collaborated closely with Massive’s SEO strategist and Queen’s internal marketing team to ensure the new site was optimized for SEO from an overarching technical and development perspective. This meant ensuring the site’s metadata, URL structure, tagging, content types and mapping aligned with the e-zine’s overall objectives and keyword and SEO strategy. Queen’s Alumni Review set out to redesign their magazine to reflect the diversity of its audience, which has expanded beyond the university community to include audiences throughout Ontario and Canada. The end result is an industry-leading, best-in-class ezine that builds on the publication’s storied past and unparalleled reputation with intuitive workflows, stunning visuals, and flexible technology stack. The website launched in March of 2022 – just in time for its Sprint edition.
Massive Media
Massive is a branding and experience design agency for companies with ambition. We partner with solution-focused companies to achieve clarity, messaging and the technologies needed to thrive in the wild. Whether the end product is a new brand, digital advertising campaign, website or digital product, our approach centres on deep cultural...
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