Branded Badges

Honors at a glance

W

ith a need to showcase Wright State University's accoldes from various sources in a clear manner, I created a large variety of award badges that the university can use in print, video, email and web.

  • CSS/HTML
  • Drupal
  • User Experience
  • UI Design
  • Email Marketing
  • Graphic Design
  • Photoshop
  • Illustrator
  • Photography & Video Editing

Creating and Organizing

Since starting the award badge project in 2020, over 70 different badges have been developed. I create, maintain, and update all badges and associated source data.


Impact

With my up-to-date badge repository available to all other designers and developers at Wright State, the badges are now a main highlight in Wright State's Emails, Billboards, Print, Landing Pages, and other Wright State promotional material.

Muliple Branded Badges featured on Wright State's main application portal
Muliple Branded Badges featured on Wright State's main application portal.

Processes

Keeping track of the award badges and making sure they are current and accurate is the largest hurdle when creating and maintaining the badges. Without a process, things can get out of hand very quickly especially when you give these badges to a full team of developers and designers. Seeing an award on an academic homepage from five years ago is not a great user experience.

Since we did not have a DAM to utilize, I had to figure out other means of organization. In Drupal, I created a custom taxonomy specific for this project. With this taxonomy I am able to track the file ID in Drupal for each badge. Developers and content creators can easily pull down a badge from an image repository driven by the taxonomy. When a creator pulls a badge from this image repository, Drupal creates an instance of the badge rather than a new unique image. Using the taxonomy I created, when it comes time to update the badge to a new year and a new source award URL, my lift is minimal. All I have to do is update the badge visually in Illustrator, save, and then edit the original file ID in Drupal with the new badge image and updated award URL. Drupal will see the updates in the original file ID then take those changes and apply them to all instances of that file ID in the next cache clear or CRON run. This entire process allows for much tighter and easier consistency in promotional accolades, ensures current and accurate badges to the end user, and is a simple tool for all internal designers and developers.

number three in the nation for wheelchair friend campus new mobility, 2020
the wright guarantee tuition program
best accredited nursing school in ohio nursingprocess.org 2022
top 50 entrepreneurship graduate program the princeton review 2022
recognized as a best value in us colleges wall street journal 2024
wright state athletics 91 percent graduate success rate 2022-23 NCAA divison 1
model united nations team delegation award 43 consecutive years
top 6.4 percent of universities worldwide 2023 center for world universty rankings

Various examples of badges I developed for the award badge program.