7. Design Branding Group

Day One outcomes

• Core Story and User Interviews, by Brian Thurber
• Branding concepts, by Gwen Kidera
• Whiteboard, by Nubia and Connor

Hackathon References

• Github Contents
  • Design branding reference material
  • Search engine background reading

Harvard references

• Style Guidelines & Best Practices
• Harvard Web Publishing resources
• Harvard Online Accessibility
• HUIT Brand Guidelines and Templates

Brainstorming examples

• DART - Digital Assets for Reuse in Teaching
  • Landing page - impactful but the two-path entryway to concept search (entering a set of keywords, or evaluating a set of passages to arrive at keywords) wouldn’t allow for the simple search box, which might mean that users would have to click through the splash page to arrive at another page where search is defined
  • Search results
    • More intervening pages may be needed between the splash page and the search results, because researchers should be able to define whether they want to apply standard search filters, whether they want their results in GUI or CSV, etc.
    • The visual display of information at the top of the search result page could be used for, perhaps displaying portraits of those authors who are most relevant to a particular search.
    • On the left-hand side, the information would have to be quite a bit more involved. Rather than “Filter by Asset Type” / “Filter by content Sources,” filters by Author, by title, etc. We could even provide a couple of main options (author/title) with icons, and then add a dropdown menu that would allow users to filter by other sorts of information (location of publication, date, genre, etc.)
    • Previewing passages makes sense, and another button could be used to select groups of passages, either to iterate the search, or to perform visualizations.

(edited comments from Stephen Osadetz)

Main Goals

• Develop the various possibilities for the branding of our search engine
• Describe the visual identity of our search engine (templates)
  • Compare what we’re developing to other search platforms that already exist
    • Google
    • Eighteenth Century Collections Online
    • HathiTrust
    • JSTOR
    • EEBO
  • Emphasize the fact that what sets our search engine apart is that it involves “concept search,” rather than keyword search
  • Talk with the Research Exploration group to find relevant eighteenth-century images for the prototype

Other goals / instructions (in order of priority)

1. Consult with other groups, particularly the Website Development group, on UX
2. Develop promotional materials for the search engine, both in its prototype form, and for later iterations
3. Develop one-pagers, other explanatory material (print);
4. Develop tutorial material for search algorithm (video or print)
5. Develop web videos to demonstrate how to use the search engine

Challenges

• Currently, our prototype website will be used to search a database of English-language 18th-Century texts
• Future
  • Add the ability to search other, much larger databases (think HathiTrust, Google Books, etc.)
  • Extend user base to researchers across the humanities
  • Let your imagination run wild, when you think about how to brand future iterations of this platform!

What to bring

• Pens, paper, any creative tools or materials that you like;
• If you have books on design that you think would be useful, bring them, too!
• If you happen to have a SLR camera or a video camera, these could be useful for developing tutorial material!