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Vanessa Beleno
Jerry Ma
Stephanie Smail
Emerald Gilana
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Adrian Gutierrez
2025 Senior Design Show Website
14 Weeks | Spring 2025
Context
Each year, San José State University hosts 4–5 senior design shows showcasing the innovation, craft, and creativity of graduating students from across the SJSU Design Department: Animation, Graphic Design, Industrial Design, Interior Design, and the new Master of Design program. In 2025, for the first time, a small cross-disciplinary team of students from these programs collaborated to design and launch the dedicated senior show website for the department of design. This platform serves as a central hub, extending the reach of the exhibitions while presenting student work in a cohesive and engaging.
“across every design discipline”
graduates designing for graduates
Involved Teams & Responsibilities
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🛠️ UX Team
Responsible for building the site’s wireframes, defining structure, and planning interactions to ensure a clear and intuitive user experience. Worked developing the blueprint for how users navigate the site.
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📸 Content Team
Collected and organized all material for the site — including student work, quotes, bios, and photos — to build a rich, cohesive archive. They managed photography and storytelling to ensure consistency across the site.
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🎨 Visual Design Team
Created the look and feel of the site, from color palettes and typography to rollovers, icons, and logos — shaping the overall visual identity and “vibe.” Work establishes departmental identity and ensuring cohesion across touchpoints.
My team focus:
🎨 Visual Design Team
One design uses bold, colorful graphics inspired by playful visuals. The other takes a clean, editorial look with sketches and neutral tones, highlighting the design process and professionalism. Both give visitors a clear entry point while showing different sides of the program’s identity.
← home page mockups
The student gallery was designed for easy browsing, with each student represented by a portrait. These two mockups show different hover states to explore how visitors might interact with the gallery.
gallery mockups →
Additional homepage concepts explore alternative layouts, incorporating bold side navigation buttons and playful frames for imagery. These variations demonstrate how the site identity could be adapted while maintaining clarity and ease of use
← more home page mockups screens
As a group, we explored different “flavors” for the Senior Show website by experimenting with type, color palettes, homepage layouts, and overall aesthetic. This collaborative exercise allowed each team member to contribute visual directions, compare approaches, and identify the styles that best captured the identity of the program.
A key consideration for the website’s color system was ensuring balanced contrast. We focused on fine-tuning brightness so that no single color dominated or appeared louder than the rest. This balance was important because each color was chosen to represent a department, rather than serving as traditional “primary” or “secondary” colors. The goal was to maintain equal visibility and harmony across all departments while keeping the system cohesive and accessible.
for color →
Once a “flavor” was finalized, we needed to incorporate a new shape meant to incorporate Masters. Above is a quick exploration of this.
To incorporate the new shapes and refined color palette, I explored additional homepage concepts.
here are the directions I shared →
Below is another concept, but with different possible hover states per shape/department.
navigation bar exploration →
← home page mockup
about page mockup →
Page Template Designing
From here on, our team of four split into two groups. Two focused on Visual Identity; refining assets such as colors, typography, icons, navigation bar, footer, gutters, margins, and other core components. The other two of us concentrated on finalizing Template Designs for each page of the website, including the homepage, about page, contact page, galleries, and more.
About Page
A place for professionals, family, any visitors to learn more about the SJSU Design Department programs.