Author: Brandon Moeller

E-mail design for Psychology

The Department of Psychology distributes a printed newsletter every semester called INSIGHTS. The newsletter is created and designed by the department’s Director of Development Lolin Wang-Bennett, who provides our CLASS Web Services office with a PDF version for posting on their website.

As part of the promotion campaign for this issue, we scheduled a time with the University’s marketing department to launch an e-mail blast to inform selected members of the university’s alumni and donor database that the new issue is available online. UH uses the non-profit focused Convio to send e-mail messages to its constituents.

This is, of course, cheaper than just mailing it to everyone – though the Department of Psychology does mail it to select alumni.

For this assignment, I worked closely with Lolin – who also shares a passion for backyard gardening – to design an e-mail that will quickly alert alumni and donors that the new issue is available. We decided we wanted the message to be short and sweet – she submitted the text for the message, my part of the assignment was to design it.

Psychology Insights email
This is a screen capture of the main part of the e-mail sent to promote the new issue of the Psychology newsletter.

I had some fun with this one. For starters, I chose an attention-getting off-yellow and I created a pin-wheel-like design that would indicate something exciting is happening at the Department of Psychology.

I designed the initial concept in Adobe Illustrator before building the tables in Adobe Dreamweaver. Yes, I designed the layout of the e-mail in tables – it’s the only reliable way a complex layout with columns will display properly across all browsers and clients when e-mailed. Designing e-mail: It’s like being stuck in 1996.

Initial design of psychology email using illustrator
This is the initial design of the psychology e-mail that I created, using Adobe Illustrator.

For the secondary graphic, I took a screen capture of the PDF newsletter, and copied it to mimic the look of it running off the presses. I then used a gradient to shade it. I thought this presented the content in an interesting, yet not overwhelming way.

Today, the e-mail message launched through the university’s Convio e-mail system.

I have archived it here on my website.

An interesting thing we discovered after running the message’s statistics in Convio: More than 2/3 of the audience that clicked through the message to see the Psychology Newsletters page did so by clicking the link in the text. The rest did so by clicking the image in the e-mail, which was also hyper-linked to the same page.

Department of Psychology website launches

Today, I launched a website I’ve been working on — off and on — for quite some time.

And, it’s one of my favorite sites that I’ve done at the University of Houston.

Department of Psychology homepage
This is the homepage of the new Department of Psychology website.

The website for the Department of Psychology is the first site that I have developed from start to finish in the new content management system, used by the College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences and purchased by the University’s marketing arm. It is a major redesign and reorganization for one of the most popular departments in the college that brings in a substantial amount of research dollars for a Tier One university.

Since its launch, data from Google Analytics appears to indicate the the Psychology homepage is the second most-visited page in the uh.edu/class directory, second only to the college homepage which I helped launch in November.

Here are some aspects of the design I am proud of.

Psychology homepage spiffs
These four images are "spiffs," an accronym for special interest feature photos. Clockwise from top left, the first photo is a submitted portrait of a student that I edited with Adobe Photoshop to remove the background and placed it on top of an image from the university marketing database. The second photo is a submitted portrait of a psychology faculty member that I also removed the background from, and added some text and a gradient to represent a study that was featured in the New York Times. Following the same technique, for the third image I removed the background of a submitted faculty portrait and added a design that represents research the professor published about algebra. The fourth and final image is one I took of a graduate student on the UH campus to represent an award she won.
Psychology people pagw
This is the index of the people section of the new Psychology website at UH. Before I could start desiging this page, I did my best to encourage each of the more than 40 fauclty members to get a new portrait photo taken, and I helped facilitate that process. The portraits were taken by a professional photographer, and we achieved a high participation rate in the high 80 percent range. What I like about the design I created is that it really demonstrates the professional nature of these professors. I tried to design the page so that if a person knows what professor they're looking for they can find that professor quickly with the photo or the name. For visitors who are casually browsing, they're quick to realize these professors are active in teaching and research. Most importantly, their contact information is readily available.
Faculty pages
Here are four samples of the psychology faculty bio pages. Each faculty member was asked to fill out a form to provide information for these pages, and I edited and stylized that information. Each of the more than 40 faculty members have their own page and own URL that they can use when presenting new research to publishers and the academic community.

Office of Educational Technology site launches

Today, the new CLASS Office of Educational Technology website launched in the UH content management system. The website combines content from three previous websites, representing the three different teams within the Office of Educational Technology.

Previously, I redesigned the website for my team, CLASS Web Services, on Aug. 12, 2009. Back then, I created a page where we showcase the websites we’ve launched since our team became a part of the CLASS Office of Educational Technology.

Launched sites
This is the Launched Sites page of the CWS section of the new OET website, which I designed to showcase website projects the office has launched for the college.

When we started redesigning websites for the college, we didn’t have a standard template. The previous CWS website was the first website to launch in our then-new PHP-based template that we created collaboratively. We used this template for a little more than a year until the website for the college became the first website we launched in the HannonHill Cascade CMS used by the university.