Campus Guides and Tours
The goal for this project was to provide visitors with a guide that would allow them to learn about Lehigh’s beautiful campus(es) in the absence of a tour guide.
The Campus Guide’s two main components are the printed guide and the audio guide (website). These pieces help visitors navigate and learn about campus. While each of these pieces can stand on its own, they are best consumed in combination, while exploring campus.
The third component is an Instagram story series, which is designed for those who are learning about campus remotely.
Recognition
CASE Circle of Excellence | Design, Publications | Silver, 2023
The Print Piece
Prior its 2022 redesign, Lehigh’s Campus Guide and Walking Tour was a large, single sheet map (that folded down to a handy 5 * 7 inches), which showed visitors the easiest path to access Lehigh’s most iconic buildings.
The 2022 reincarnation was designed to do more. Some key updates made were:
• the addition of ADA-accessible walking routes—an important feature for a campus with as many stairs as Lehigh’s!
• reimagining the piece’s form to create something that visitors would find convenient to carry and use as they navigate campus.
• the inclusion of images that show life inside each of the buildings—as visitors have limited access to Lehigh’s buildings.
Companion Website: Audio Guide
The audio guide website, titled the Self-Guided Tour, is a student-led guide to all the stops listed in the printed Campus Guide and Walking Tour. Custom recorded for this website, each stop’s audio track provides information and anecdotes from the student guide.
Care was taken to ensure that this site would be easy to use while walking around campus:
• design was approached mobile-first.
• audio tracks for each stop are embedded on the website, and arranged in the same order as the printed guide.
• to reduce load-times, the audio files on this site are hosted on SoundCloud.
• to further optimize load-times, instead of hosting images on this site, we opted to use a SoundCloud embed that includes an image—allowing each track to include a visual of the stop, which matches the image used in the printed piece.
Instagram Story Series
The Campus Tours Instagram series was created to introduce prospective students to Lehigh’s three beautiful campuses remotely, and to drive viewers to explore the many visit opportunities Lehigh offers. The series ran every Wednesday for 19 weeks, with each story featuring an iconic Lehigh space that plays an important role in undergraduate students’ time at the university.
To give viewers a strong sense of place within just a few frames, each of the 19 tour-stops was given its own story, following this structure:
• Introduction: animated, showing the relative location of each tour-stop to the next, with an indication of the quickest route.
• About the space’s history
• How the space is used today
• Closing: call to action, inviting prospective students to explore campus visit opportunities.
Copy, written in tandem with design, was concise and informative, with a friendly tone. Classical serif type was used to balance out this (friendly) tone. Photography selection was based on authenticity, to show a prospective student what their life at Lehigh could look like.
