Cleveland Institute of Music

Helping a world-class conservatory show up online the way it performs on stage.

00

challenge

The Cleveland Institute of Music had a website that had grown disorganized over time, making it difficult for prospective students, faculty, and the broader arts community to find information or feel inspired by the institution. Navigation was complex, user pathways were unclear, and the visual presentation didn't reflect the prestige and creativity of a world-class conservatory.

solution

I led a complete redesign of CIM's primary website, starting with onsite workshops with leadership, students, and faculty, followed by user interviews and card-sorting sessions to reorganize the site architecture. From there I developed multiple visual directions and worked iteratively with leadership to refine content, navigation, and a final design system that matched the caliber of the institution.



year

2016

timeframe

4 months

tools

Adobe Creative Suite, Lottie

category

Branding and Identity

01

The existing site had no clear pathways for its most important audiences: prospective students, current students, parents, and faculty all landed in the same undifferentiated experience. I ran card-sorting sessions and workshops onsite with CIM stakeholders to rebuild the architecture from the ground up, creating distinct, intuitive pathways for each audience without fragmenting the overall site.

02

CIM needed to feel both prestigious and welcoming, a balance that's easy to get wrong in either direction. I developed multiple visual directions for leadership to react to, using that process to surface what the institution valued most about how it wanted to be seen. That collaborative refinement shaped everything from typography choices to how photography was treated across the site.

03

The final site brought together everything we learned through research and collaboration. Clean, confident navigation. A visual identity that felt worthy of a world-class conservatory. And a content structure that made it easy for every audience to find what they came for and feel something while doing it.

.let's connect

Always open to conversations where UI, brand, and systems leadership accelerate growth.

.let's connect

Always open to conversations where UI, brand, and systems leadership accelerate growth.