MIT School of Engineering

Our work took a wide scope, touching everything from brand voice to backend governance. We tackled a verbal and visual identity refresh, a technical audit of the school's sprawling digital ecosystem, a new information architecture, and a redesigned site built on a component-based design system.

Brand: Finding the SoE's voice within MIT's

The project began with the brand. Working closely with the SoE communications team, we recalibrated the school's voice, tone, value proposition, and messaging to better reflect where engineering is headed and what makes MIT SoE's culture and values distinct. The goal was two-sided: connect more intentionally to MIT's core identity, while giving SoE the room to tell its own story about its people, its interdisciplinary focus areas, and its impact on and off campus.

Our collaborators at SoE told us one of their pain points was how to express the best part of their community: the weirdness. (Good weird!) So we developed a content plan that required our product owner travel around campus and do low-fi point-and-shoot-style interviews of passing students and professors. The result is candid, fun, expressive, and much more true to the SoE brand than a brochure, while connecting with audiences where they already are online.  The work resulted in updated messaging and brand documentation designed not just for this launch, but to arm the SoE communications team with the tools to keep developing the brand in the years ahead.

Audit: Making sense of a complex digital landscape

Before we could design anything, we needed to understand what already existed. A technical audit of SoE's full site landscape mapped what was worth keeping, what could be absorbed into a unified platform, what had run its course, plus provided potential governance recommendations for what came next.

The audit also surfaced opportunities to reduce technical overhead, improve the user experience across the portfolio, and establish clearer ownership of the platform long-term.

Architecture and design: Built for many audiences, managed by a few

MIT SoE serves a wide range of users—prospective students, researchers, faculty, press, and institutional stakeholders—each with different needs and different reasons for being on the site. The new information architecture organizes the school's programs, initiatives, and resources so that each of those audiences can find what they're looking for via a clear pathway.

The redesigned site runs on a flexible design system that’s component-based, fully responsive, and built to accessibility standards validated within MIT's regulatory criteria. The templates and components are designed to adapt as the school launches new programs or initiatives, and to be managed by staff without requiring developer involvement for routine content updates. We also developed art direction and visual guidance for asset creation and placement, and documented a theory of governance for both technical and non-technical users, partnering with the SoE team through CMS implementation, content migration, and launch.