Creative Studio

Cengage

At Cengage, Creative Studio is the internal creative agency responsible for designing educational assets and programs that power the educational platform, including book covers, motion graphics, data visualizations, and more.

The existing site was a tiny, Flash-based site that had little more to offer than a slightly whimsical form. I chose to build a new site in WordPress. We needed to showcase the work and the team and let internal clients know our capabilities and how to work with us.

My role: Designer, developer, copywriter, with credit going to my co-workers for shooting the team videos.

View the Project


cengage creative studio

Highlights


Team Bio video;
  • Filterable Portfolio: The work portfolio is easily navigable using filtered categories, providing insight into the diverse range of team expertise.
  • Engaging Project Form: Simplifying the process, our intuitive form prompts stakeholders with tailored questions with a touch of whimsy, capturing project details accurately.
  • Animation Calculator: The built-in calculator provides instant estimates for several animation categories, optimizing resource allocation.
  • Team Bios: We used video to replace the usual team photos to introduce our agency members with some personality. It was really fun making these!

Design

I created the home page video to communicate the power of story-telling and inspire stakeholders to envision the possibilities and see the process as a collaborative one.

I used a vibrant palette and created a logo centered around the Cengage brand. We wanted to make a splash!


Creative Studio Logo

Technical Details


Tools logo mashup;
  • WordPress: I did not hestitate to use his popular CMS, with the its time-honored flexibility ease of use, implementing custom-built theme.
  • Advanced Custom Fields: Built a custom page template utilizing ACF to enable section-based pages with options for column, tab, and card layouts.
  • Modern Tooling: By employing modern tools like Gulp and npm for script and style optimization, and a CDN for assets, the site boasts excellent performance.
  • Enhanced Security: Per my usual practice, I implemented trusted plugins like Wordfence and WordPress best practices, in order to keep the site secure.
  • Styling: This site leverages SASS and the Zurb Foundation framework, which, along with Bootstrap, pioneered responsive columns and mobile-first styling.

Prologue

I have archived this site on my domain as it was internal-facing and not accessible to the public. There is much more that we wanted to add to this site, but unfortunately, Cengage closed its San Francisco offices in early 2019.