The Smart Set is an independent arts and culture publication published by Drexel University. It focuses on longform non-fiction writing, from reported travel essays to musings on culture.
When I first redesigned the site in 2013, it was a major overhaul. For that update (read the case study here) I worked with an outside developer and a content migration company to do a major overhaul of the design and move the site to WordPress.
For this iteration, completed in 2019, the task was a bit different, and a bit smaller. The site was still functional, but with changes in leadership and team size/composition, the goals and tone of the magazine had shifted. We wanted to bring the look and feel of the site more in line with that new tone – fresher, younger, more diverse, more contemporary, but still smart and eclectic. I also wanted to streamline the editorial workflow to help the smaller team work faster and easier, while starting to take advantage of the new features inWordPress, like the Gutenberg editor.
The result was a clean, modern site that took the vintage travel poster and Italian typography inspirations of previous versions of the site to a brighter place. Lightweight microinteractions cover and reveal content to add visual interest to the strong grid. On the back end, users can easily customize the color palette of each post, setting the background and headline type colors to match the illustration.
