The 2012 Redesigned Homepage of sva.edu

Funny Garbage and SVA (School of Visual Arts in New York) have teamed up again to launch a completely redesigned and modernized website.

SVA's prior award winning website, which launched in 2004, was also designed and built by Funny Garbage. It is a testament to the original design that it served as the digital brand for the world-class design school for such a long period of time and continued to receive awards and nominations –most recently nominated in 2011 for a Webby! However, it was time for an update.

The redesign was led on SVA's side by Michael Walsh and the team at SVA's Visual Arts Press. Among the goals for the redesign, SVA requested more tools for showcasing student, faculty, and alumni work. In addition to JavaScript-powered slideshows –available for nearly all templates throughout the site– the large homepage rotator can be used to feature individual items as well as groups of items; there's even a feature that enables users to collapse the overlay displaying the slides' titles and captions, letting the work shine through.

During the discovery phase, Funny Garbage's user experience department conducted in-depth stakeholder interviews with SVA faculty and staff to develop a list of requested features and potential pitfalls for the new site. One of the key findings was that many of the programs and departments felt like they were underrepresented on the homepage of the site. Funny Garbage's solution was the Trending Now grid, an editorially curated, paginated display of content aggregated from the plethora of blogs and social networking sites maintained by SVA's programs and departments. With this tool, whenever the programs and departments update their blogs and social networking sites the content is pulled into a queue of content that can be pushed to SVA’s homepage. 

These are just a handful of the new features. Check out the new sva.edu. you'll love the clean design, intuitive user experience, and the rich, well organized content!