FUSE AT MASON SQUARE
THE BRIEF
Fuse at Mason Square is a technology research hub based at George Mason University. While working at Neoscape, I was tasked with designing a landing page for the development.
TIMELINE
1 Month
November 2021
TEAM
The designs shown are my own, but I worked alongside two other designers on this project.
KEY GOAL
Design a landing page to attract potential tenants.
BREAKING DOWN THE PROCESS
The client did not provide a brand package, not did they opt for our brand team to create a brand identity for them. Our design team was therefore responsible for establishing a visual system during the website design process. We decided to come up with one light option, which I worked on, and one dark option, which my colleague worked on.
Initial Concept
As far as establishing a visual identity, we were given very little to work with other than some of the logos of the partners attached to the project and a general instruction to give the website a modern, technological feel.
I was immediately drawn to the Mason Innovation Partners logo as it had a lot of interesting colors and negative shapes that I could play with.
After extracting the negative shapes from the logo, I began exploring ways that they could be incorporated into a long-scroll layout with the provided content.
Initial Sketches
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I came up with a range of rough options, varying the size and placement of the shapes - some examples are shown here.
Feedback overall was that the concept was modern, energetic, and enticing, but that it was maybe lacking the 'technological' feel.
Final Design
As I was refining my design, I came up with a double-layered, 'glowing' concept, to give the shapes a more activated, electrified feel. The client ended up loving the concept and said they would take the design exactly as it was, however, after internal discussions, they decided that a darker direction would better suit the brand identity they were looking to build moving forward. The other direction was therefore used in the end, though I was asked to design the final map for the darker concept, bringing in the layered, glowing effect from my website concept.
A video walkthrough of my website concept can be found below.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
Having to carve out the visual identity of the website with limited stimuli while designing the site was a great challenge and a fantastic learning opportunity. Although my web design direction was not ultimately used, it was also a good exercise to explore to bring the most successful aspects of my web concept into a map designed to fit the other direction.