For the past six or so months, I’ve been involved in two large projects with the admissions department at BU – this is actually the second of the two, the first will be in a forthcoming post. The Viewbook is a key recruiting tool for the university, accepted students receive it as one of the primary pieces of collateral alongside an acceptance letter. The goal is to show just what can be done and what life is like at the university and to help solidify a decision. This year, the print publication was highly integrated with a web component, taking over parts of the admissions website but also including a custom, highly interactive piece.
The feature also appeared on the BU homepage for approximately two weeks. The homepage presentation is a simple Away3D scene animating in briefly and drawing attention to the content.
The grid contains a large collection of video content from various sources, utilizing the BUniverse player, and sample student schedules (a component from a previous edition of the viewbook). Content is categorized by student-centric topics such as Faculty, Dining & Housing, Student Life, etc. Each of the categories acts as a filter mechanism to highlight all of the squares relating to that topic.
Filtering can be activated by clicking one of the topic squares or using the fixed-position footer menu. This menu is slated to be hidden in the near future for mobile devices that do not support fixed positioning.
When scrolled to the bottom of the page, the filter menu tucks itself into the page to allow access to the footer.
Hovering over any of the squares that activates video/schedule content reveals a brief bit of teaser copy.
After clicking one of the squares, the grid slides down to reveal the video or schedule, a description, and a list of related content. The grid fades down except for the active video, and on hover fades up either the filtered selection or the entire grid if nothing is currently filtered.
BUniverse provides alternative content for devices not supporting the Flash Player that acts as a link to the actual YouTube hosted version of the file so it can play in a native application. The experience also works with JavaScript disabled. The grid is fixed to five items wide and when squares are clicked, the browser is redirected to a static page. The static pages, which can be an entry point via a search engine, redirect the visitor to the full grid with the video from the still page automatically opened via a hash tag on the URL.
I acted as the sole developer on this project with Jon Brousseau as the designer. The Admissions Viewbook is currently available live and as a short video below.
