AIGA
Strategy, Design, Development, Support
AIGA, the professional association for design, is a non-profit organization with over 25,000 members in 70 chapters across the country. Although the chapters are independently run, AIGA wanted to build a platform that would allow them to create a rich online presence with minimal technical effort.
Enter: iKit. At its core, the iKit is a plugin for WordPress, the CMS selected by AIGA for its ubiquity and easy set-up. The chapters simply install the iKit plugin as they would any WordPress plugin, enable the iKit theme, and customize from there. The plugin centralizes AIGA’s content (social, news, jobs, events, etc.) and the theme styles and displays the content. Once a chapter enters their specifics (like zipcode, social handles, and chapter ID), the plug-in pulls in the content relevant to that location.
Although iKit launched with only one theme, AIGA commissioned us to create additional themes to offer more variety. Because we knew that visual trends in the design community would inevitably change, we designed the front- and back-ends to work independently from each other with defined integration points. This allowed us to design a new theme without modifying the backend plug-in, and chapters were able to simply enable the new theme to implement a total visual redesign. Additionally robust setting options allow chapters to modify aspects of the visual design.
The iKit has been a major success with 95% of local chapters adopting it. Its success hinges on the speed of deployment – about 15 minutes per site – along with how simple it is to use and update, thanks to its modular design. So far, chapter implementations have been diverse, and the framework has accommodated the needs of web admins with all levels of technical expertise. All of these advantages have made the iKit popular with the AIGA community as a whole, and we continue to add new features and visual improvements based on online and in-person feedback.
Samsung
Design
Samsung NEXT was founded in 2013 with idea of creating breakthrough software and services and bringing startup culture into Samsung. What started as a small group in Silicon Valley has since become a global organization working together to realize Samsung’s vision and the dreams of entrepreneurs all over the world.
W&CO was brought on board to develop a fresh new identity for this organization. We designed a detailed vision with corresponding guidelines that are meant to set the foundation for Samsung NEXT’s visual language — how they speak, display, and communicate information.
