About the project
The Coronavirus Spring led to an unprecedented amount of school closures across the U.S. At Education Week, we decided early on that we needed to provide a framework of options and best practices to help school and district leaders make informed decisions for their community.
My role
The Coronavirus Spring led to an unprecedented amount of school closures across the U.S. At Education Week, we decided early on that we needed to provide a framework of options and best practices to help school and district leaders make informed decisions for their community.
As the digital and visual project editor for this 8-part series, my role was to create the framework for the series, develop a style guide and drive how the stories would be told. Each segment was structured with a landing page that utilized strong visual elements with distillations of text. The goal is that a user could come to this page and get all the basic information they need - something that is important to our busy school/district leader audience. There’s no one-size-fits-all approach for schools, so we added deeper dives and other supplementary material so the user could choose which segments they wanted to consume. We also ensured the in-article experience was optimal by creating a lot of link-backs to other content, custom visualizations but also re-using elements from the landing page since so much of our traffic goes through a back door. The stories stray from the traditional narrative style and take a more explainer-like approach to make the information as accessible as possible.
I created a stark color palette to reflect the seriousness of the content - utilizing our brand standards, but leaning into some of our deeper tones. All of the graphic elements for the series are custom made by my-self and the rest of the design team, often visualizing concepts that have no visual reference material.
During the project, I worked in coordination with our revenue teams to deploy the series in a new template that was mobile-friendly and allowed for monetization. In addition, we were able to create new, sell-able products associated with this series, including a series of webinars, that have had significant impact on our revenue earnings. The series has been very popular among our audience groups and has been the most successful project in driving registrations and subscriptions.
