Congratulations to the Kellogg School of Management on their Site Launch!

The Kellogg School’s new website went live on Friday, 29 July 2008, hurrah!

The project was one of the coolest and most challenging things we’ve taken on as a team—several moving parts including the installation of a content management system, new information architecture and content, a new interface design, and a good deal of multimedia production. And probably the most daunting thing of all: to create a site that lives up to the institution’s reputation as one of the prestigious business schools in the world.

We learned a lot about business school-specific behavior (like the fact that prospectives usually do a great deal of research on third-party sites before ever coming to the business school’s site itself) and expectations (multimedia, good, edgy design, bad). The project also affirmed three tenets that we’ve found true across all of our projects over the years: you need to plan your short-term goals with the objectives of the distant horizon in mind; everything lives and dies by project management; and the best relationships are communicative, collaborative, and unflinchingly frank. Oh, and scones always make meetings go better. A special shout-out to Eric, Dan, and James at Kellogg—y’all are wonderful to work with, thank you for choosing us!

I’m particularly proud of the homepage media picker that brings the Kellogg School to virtual life through videos (many of which we shot with our friends at Olin-Hake Films), slideshows, and profiles. I also think that the faculty site does a terrific job of aggregating a great deal of information in a unified interface and showcasing each of the faculty members at the School. And the design as a whole integrates very well with the Kellogg School’s centennial celebration site and online faculty journal, both of which we helped to conceive and launch.