and Sarah Lawrence College

A higher ed website beyond convention

Sarah Lawrence College, a small liberal arts college in Bronxville, New York, has spent a century teaching students to build their own education. Forgoing the typical fixed track, students design their programs in one-on-one conferences with faculty, allowing for singular intellectual and creative inquiry into particular fields. This pull toward the personal and practical is so much a defining aspect of the College it was called "the most individualized education in America" by education writer Loren Pope.

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Creating a digital proxy for that ideal has long been a desire for the College.  Prospective students and parents should feel the difference of such an explorative experiential learning program by how information is surfaced and taxonomically related. A door that opens to the arts may by various twists and turns end at the study of the African diaspora. The new website exposes the base ingredients of every course, approximating this invitation to wander by encouraging visitors to navigate by following their interests.

While discovery-forward the site is also a guide, foregrounding an interest explorer that connects formal and experiential study options to in-practice stories featuring faculty, students, and alumni. Results interleave rather than stacking course after course, and flow into channels, academic, experiential, outcomes, so a single interest returns a full education to career arc. A coming release lets students search in their own words: type "I want to win an Oscar" and the explorer maps it to Film, matching intent rather than keywords, so a prospective student who cannot yet name the discipline still finds the door to it.

Sarah Lawrence's approach develops creative thinkers who can more readily adapt to new situations thanks to a fluid combination of skills, and demonstrating real-world impact is a defining quality of a practical education. The new website puts this belief front and center, spotlighting recent graduates and longtime alumni who made, and continue to make, a real difference in the world.

The visual language of the site gives a nod to the College's pedagogical framework through a componentized system whose boundaries interlock. Type operates in big and small extremes to create different moods, evoking feelings of deep scholarship and boundless enthusiasm.

Delivered as a design system and component library the College implemented in its own CMS.