***For the full breakdown and more images of my process, see my post on Behance here.***

After creating the new svadprojects.com gallery website for University of South Carolina’s School of Visual Art & Design (see project below), I still saw a gap in the student community and participation in SVAD’s many diverse organizations and events. Bridging the gap between SVAD’s physical and digital networks, the “SVAD Students” app envisions an elegant mobile platform aiming to raise student participation in SVAD organizations, sharing work on the svadprojects.com student gallery (“Virtual Studio”), and increasing overall event attendance through partnership with USC’s “student point” reward system. In turn, student use of the app would provide SVAD’s leaders with a powerful cache of data to better understand how to connect with what the true needs of the student community.

SVAD Students is powerful in its simplicity, guiding users to engage on three essential action verbs (CREATE, CONNECT, ATTEND). By focusing on these specific, actionable objectives, SVAD Students raises student engagement without trapping them in tedious, endless content. It gets students excited to be involved, then inspires them to put down the phone and get back to creating their next masterpiece.

As a School of Visual Art & Design student, I found much of the spectacular work students and visiting artists brought to SVAD went unnoticed and unpublished. I also found a gap between the many events the School held and the community’s awareness of them. I envisioned a vehicle for nurturing relationships between students from different SVAD programs while increasing our visibility to prospective students. This sparked the idea for the official SVAD gallery website, svadprojects.com.

The Virtual Studio features a blog for students to submit their own work, a calendar of SVAD-related events, student organization info, and blogs for each of SVAD’s unique gallery spaces and visiting artist series. The site serves as a hub for everything students need to digitally publish their work, discover what their peers are making, and get involved in artistic communities bigger than themselves. To see everything it has to offer, visit the live site here.