NC State Stories is a systematic editorial content builder. Utilizing the new WordPress editor, Gutenberg, this platform is comprised of modular blocks to tell a variety of stories for NC State University Communications and Marketing. Leading the design effort for this narrative web product launched in January of 2019, NC State Stories continues to be a robust collaboration between design, web development, and content strategy.
Units across campus create a wide variety of narrative content highlighting campus life updates, transportation logistics, notable research and marketing content. NC State Stories was created to accommodate for that variety.
Each block conforms to typographical and spacing logic allowing additional blocks to be created quickly based on this predetermined system. Our goal was to produce an exhaustive product, one that can be built upon and extended as needed.
We proactively made design decisions extending beyond the bare minimum legal requirements for accessibility benefiting the majority of users who will use web accessibility accommodations at some point in their lives.
The flexible menu system and navigation bar were created to accommodate various use cases, whether a site had seven top categories or three. Based upon these discrepancies, we felt that forcing a transition into a collapsed menu at the same breakpoint for all sites no longer made sense. So instead, NC State Stories transitions to a collapsed menu as soon as the menu items run out of space.
The category destination pages are designed to encourage users to browse and consume more content than a standard category feed. Our intention was that these new category pages can be a flexible landing page option for campaigns.
The one-column structure was created as a reaction to inconsistent experiences between desktop and mobile and odd sizing and line break issues from many campus partners. Each block occupies space dictated by a center column flex grid structure.