Fellowships in Information Design
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Centre for Social Accountability - Rhodes University


Grahamstown

Fellowships > Centre for Social Accountability - Rhodes University

The Challenges

Currently CSA is considered as the name of the organization and PSAM is a program of the organization. But in reality, PSAM is much more recognized as the name of the organization than CSA. The brandings of the two logos look exactly the same, but with different names. It is very confusing for people who are not familiar with the organization. After several rounds of discussions, the organization decided to move forward with PSAM as the universal logo and name for the whole organization. Parsons Fellows Tianhua Duan was responsible for redesigning the logo, business cards, newsletter and website to reflect the new changes.

The Solutions

Business Card
A freelance company designed the existing one and its information hierarchy, look and feel were major issues. The contact information and detail information were put on the top of the card, while the name and title of owner were on the bottom in smaller font size. It made the most important information – name and title, lost in the card. Parsons Fellows Duan redesigned PSAM business card with simple visual style and included only necessary information.

Newsletter
PSAM needed a layout that could support the diverse needs of the content and be easy to replace with Photoshop. Since there was not enough content for the newsletter, Duan designed a template with minimal design style with the flexibility to change the content without compromising the look.

Website
The website was the biggest challenge in the whole program. It was very old and did not reflect the organization's changing needs. Even PSAM staff explained, "Even the staffs themselves can’t find the content they need.” The root cause of this issue is from the design of the navigation system of the site. It forces the users to continuously click “next” to navigate between different pages without a way to skip to any particular page. Additionally, the content of the site is very text heavy and barely any images on the site.

  • For a content rich website, it was recommended that PSAM provide as short as possible a summary of information, so that it would be obvious enough to attract users' attention. Images were added to be effective elements to attract users as well.
  • For the interface design aspect, PSAM and Duan laid out the functions, interaction system, information hierachy and visual design for each page of the website.
  • Since a big percentage of users in South Africa access the internet with their mobile devices, the website's images were trimmed down. The bandwidth of mobile devices is normally not as good as computers, so the downloading speed was very important to consider.

    • After the upgrades, the original branding system was intact and the website looked similar to the other design projects of PSAM, such as their publications and newsletters. Parsons Fellows Duan continues to work on the PSAM website and anticipates the launch date this December.

    Photos

    Web Design
    Print Design
    Web Design
    Name Card Design
    Print Design
    Info Graph
    Print Design
    Print Design
    Print Design
    Print Design
    Print Design
    Print Design
    Print Design
    Print Design

    NGOs

    Centre for Social Accountability - Rhodes University (CSA)

    Centre for Social Accountability - Rhodes University (CSA)

    Grahamstown, South Africa

    Fellows

    Tianhua Duan

    Tianhua Duan

    Neil Duan (Tianhua Duan) originally comes from Beijing, China and moved to New York City, US at 2010. She graduated from Tsinghua University, Graphic Design department at 2005, now is pursuing her master degree at Parsons the new school for design, Design and Technology department. She is a User Interface Designer, had been working in the IT companies, like Microsoft and Tencent, for 5 years before attending into Parsons. She has rich experiences on visual design and interaction design, in the same time, emphasizes the importance of usability design. Neil also works on frontend development with HTML, CSS, Jquery and so on. Her research interest is on web design and mobile application design. She's also extremely interested in design basing on social networking system and how to utilize the system in professional fields beside of entertainment. Now she's looking for a way to utilize psychology as an entry point for design projects. Her design field covers from traditional graphic design to digital design for software, application and website.

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