Website   Booklet  

1.0   2.0  

The Higher School of Economics website templates 2.0

Overview   Process   Award  

[This work is in the museum]

Task: to create templates for all websites of a university.

The Higher School of Economics is a state university founded in 1992. Today its campuses are located in Moscow, Saint Petersburg, Nizhny Novgorod and Perm. The University participates in the development of state programs, implements projects for the largest companies, provides education on all levels from vocational school to graduate, engages in fundamental and applied research, opens research laboratories and collaborates with world-famous universities. In order to present various areas of the HSE activity, website templates were developed to be used in the design of websites of the University’s projects and departments.

hse site2 main
The latest news are shown on the front page of the main site

The website provides an information area where staff and students can communicate, share internal news, talk about University life and discuss the latest events.

hse site2 insider
Communication for everyone

The portal is a living instrument, its materials are constantly updated, the number of authors is growing and the structure is becoming increasingly complex. At the same time, the scale of the website does not affect the ease of finding the required information. Given the complexity of the task, it was decided to implement the templates gradually, maintaining the operation of all elements.

Release date: August 19 2014

Cast:

art director
designers
interface designers
technical designers
technologists
editors
project managers
The studio wishes to thank Ksenia Muratova, Maria Dobryakova, Natalya Abolina and Alexey Galygin for their help with the project

Subdivisions

The website can be easily adapted to the needs of all departments of the University. The departments are color-coded: each of them chooses a color scheme and a background from a pre-defined set.

Lower-level departments such as schools use fragments of the same color scheme which helps maintain continuity. If needed, photographs can be added to the background.

Life of the Department of Economics

From a news story to a special project

Every day a variety of news is published on University website. Tools for highlighting text fragments—words and numbers—allow to draw the visitors’ attention to essential facts and brightest moments of a story. A special emphasis is made on tools for semantic tagging which allow to link news items with relevant pages of the website.

Bright special projects

The easiest way to identify a department is to use a color background from a provided set. Should an image be required, a specially formatted photograph can be added to the website.

Cards of megadepartments that have many subdivisions are collapsed into stacks
News story page

Topics and categories

Links between objects that existed in the previous version of the website were made more obvious with the help of interconnection. The system suggests possible tags and ways to reach the chosen page.


The full picture

Variations within the template

Pages of the portal use a unified grid to display information blocks. The blocks can be rearranged according to their importance and the current situation, for example during entrance or final exams. An urgent announcement can be used for breaking news.

Contemporary classics

University departments and activities are brought together with the help of recognizable style elements: images of plaster figurines. They include modern hi-tech items that acquire an unusual classic look.

Special styles were created for numerous charts and graphs

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