RJC began with an intent to educate the greater public on Restorative Justice by hosting events and providing services and trainings to students, faculty, and the greater community. In the early stages of the Center, they were bootstrapped and largely operating on a student volunteer basis.
Over time, the center grew in popularity and began to receive more funding. However, the original website was developed very early on by a student and had been maintained by several volunteers. By the time I was brought on, the needs were clear:
Working closely with the team, I determined the most important functions of the website as well as how to prioritize each audience to build the sitemap.
We needed to borrow visual language from the UC Berkeley website in order to maintain a cohesive brand and association with the RJC. This included using the fonts and colors on the site, as well as the treatment of images and interactive elements.
After determining the styles that we would borrow from berkeley.edu to maintain visual association with the university, I developed several style tiles to communicate the direction that the website would take. Below is the winning tile that we used for reference for the initial home page layout.
The logo was also reimagined as I updated the branding. I recreated the logo, keeping the circle but using the LTC Californian Text from the UC Berkeley Logo.
With the new visual elements finalized, I started iterating on design for the home page. I generally start designing the home page because the variety of elements on the page tends to function as a stress test for the design system. At this stage I explored typography scales and page hierarchy.
