Harvard Westlake
Harvard Westlake is an independent, university preparatory day school for students grades 7-12. With two locations in Bel Air and Studio City, Harvard Westlake provides a diverse and inclusive community focused on educational excellence, integrity, and purpose.
Services
branding strategy, creative strategy, positioning & messaging, identity, standards and consistency control, custom graphics, web design, user-friendly interfaces, infographics, web development, e-commerce, data tracking
Background
Established in 1900, the Harvard School was originally a military school for boys that grew to become an independent, self-governing school in the 1930s. The Westlake School for Girls was founded around the same time and grew to become an anchor for development in the Los Angeles community. In 1989, the two schools agreed to merge with expansions and renovations leading into what is now known as the modern day Harvard-Westlake.
Opportunity
We Design LA provided Harvard Westlake with an extensive development of a custom micro-site to showcase their HW Go! program that provides students with the opportunity to study abroad. We helped to create a unique site that represents the exploration and cultural value of their students experiences above all else. We developed the site to tell the students’ stories from their perspective with photos and testimonials from the actual students themselves. This site will work as an anchor for Harvard Westlake to encourage their students to take part in the HW GO! opportunities as well as for their parents, faculty, and staff to interact and engage as well.
Our Custom Solution
We started from square one with Harvard Westlake, brainstorming and drawing up plans of what their ideal microsite would look like. Not only did it need to reflect the school’s mission of “living and learning with integrity, and purpose beyond ourselves”, but also it needed to give off a feeling of what HW Go! really means for the students. This was where we were able to come up with fun, unique, and highly interactive ideas to get the students involved in telling their own stories.
We worked closely with the team at Harvard Westlake to collect photos from the students themselves that they took on their trips. We also had them submit testimonials which we would then feature on each of the trip’s sub-pages. The homepage is a mosaic that filters through all of the trips by year and destination, giving the user an opportunity to explore or narrow down their search. On top of that, the homepage featured custom graphics to capture the sense of exploration and intellectual curiosity so central to the purpose of HW GO!.
Beyond the traveling aspect, we wanted to help highlight HW GO! as an experience beyond the actual trip itself. We showcased all the ways to get involved such as joining clubs or volunteering for an organization to emphasize that the experience is a lifelong one. What these students gather from their trips is knowledge and a new worldview. With that, we featured highly visual and dynamic pages to incorporate this into every aspect of the site. All of the graphics were designed custom by our team, and the coding was seamlessly integrated to enable a casual user flow through the site.
The HW Go! microsite invites you into become a part of the story. We aimed to make it like a scrapbook, but a living and breathing one. Not only is it highly visual, dynamic, and interactive, but also it provides a platform for students, parents, friends, and faculty to actively be involved in a continuing educational experience. We created a custom contact form to keep the conversation going and are looking forward to seeing how the site grows and expands in the future. We will be on board with their team every step of the way.
Results
Interactive, dynamic website to connect faculty, students, and staff
Highly visual trip scrapbook developed with the students
Creative storytelling strategy to reflect educational excellence
Endorsement
