The Signal: 2017

The most recent design of The Signal was a massive upgrade to the publication’s Website – both front and back end. Emphasis was placed on making the user experience, both as creator and as reader, to be modern, functional and as simple as a news website can be.

In selecting the colors, I wanted to establish green as a dominant color. University of Houston-Clear Lake’s colors are Blue and Green, yet more emphasis is always placed on Blue. The Green I selected was a shade of similar tone to the college campus’ branding.

The accent color “greys” which I selected however both come from desaturated blues – This way the effect of “blue and green” still has roots in the design when relating to UHCL.

I wanted to pick out three fonts for the styling of the articles. One for special circumstances and displays, one for Headlines specifically and one for body text.

Up until this point, The Signal had always used serif fonts for it’s body copy, as classical newspapers typically do. However, after some small focus groups of our readers and staff members, the change to serif fonts for body text was overwhelmingly positive.

Typography

To finalize the modernization of the design – we wanted everything to appear easy to read and be responsive! This same layout also made integrating our articles into Facebook and AMP mobile postings easy to match.

Lastly, for the back end of the WordPress publishing environment, we made multiple edits to the CMS code and focused our usergroups for student staff.

Most reporters for the Signal are seeing WordPress or any website CMS for the very first time – and a lot of them make the same complaint of there being “too much to learn” or “being afraid of breaking something.” By limiting and simplifying access to the only options needed for publication, we saw the success of student reporters in a much faster time period then in previous years due to a lesser learning curve with the CMS.

Visit The Signal at www.uhclthesignal.com. Issues are released weekly August through May.