Harvard University Graduate School of Design

We’ve been honored to work with the Harvard Graduate School of Design over the past two years on their public facing website and digital infrastructure. The GSD is a wonderful, inspiring and cerebral place. They’re global leaders in design and design research, and they trusted Upstatement to build them a state of the art new digital presence.

Like any major architectural project, there’s much more than meets the eye. Before beginning work on the user interface or anything the public would see, our engineering team worked with Harvard’s team to modernize their approach to content systems. We built an API and management layer for the GSD that combines their many back-end systems, from courses to people, events, projects, media and resources. Mike Burns was our Fazlur Khan, laying the groundwork for the beautiful statement Creative Director Scott Dasse and Design Lead Andy Rader would build on top.

The result is a beautiful, content-forward approach to a university site. A site that unlocks the GSD’s creativity and showcases its work and ideas in an inspiring and approachable way. A new set of back-end tools and a digital, capital improvement to Harvard’s systems that’s already paying dividends as it’s used beyond the website.

Head over to gsd.harvard.edu to see the first version of the public site, or scroll down for some of our favorite moments from the design.