Created in 1996 to secure the financial independence of Stanford’s student government, SSE manages a total of five student-run businesses which fund Stanford’s student life. As an organization that prides itself on its independence from the university, SSE felt that their previous website drew too much from Stanford’s branding and did not reflect the energy and talent of their student employees. As one of SSE’s enterprises, Cardinal Labs conducted a ground-up remodel of the website with emphasis on communicating the organization’s values to the larger Stanford community.
Check out the live website at sse.stanford.edu
In order to better communicate the structure and purpose of SSE to Stanford’s larger student community, we identified the following challenges:
• Visual rebranding
• Condensing, clarifying, and
updating information
We determined two overall methods of achieving our goals. First, we designed a more modern aesthetic through the primary use of colors and geometric graphics. Additionally, we conducted user research in order to determine what information was relevant to users, then reworked and reworded accordingly.
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Webflow
Figma
We used Webflow to build the new SSE website. We chose to use Webflow because it allowed both designers and developers to be involved in the development phase and easily bring our mockups to life. It also allows SSE to easily make changes and edit the site whenever they need without much technical knowledge.
After receiving the new SSE logo, we needed to change our previous design for the SSE website. The main challenge we faced was figuring out how to best incorporate the colors of the new logo into the website.
We played around with different ways to integrate the Aqua and Brick Red into our existing design of the website. We also tried to change our hexagon motif, but found that the logo looked quite nice with the hexagons.
See the latest version of the SSE website at sse.stanford.edu.
