northern california society of parenteral and enteral nutrition

The Northern California Society of Parenteral and Enteral Nutrition (NOCSPEN) is the Northern California chapter of ASPEN, an interdisciplinary organization whose members are involved in the provision of clinical nutrition therapies. As the Communications Chair and Newsletter Editor of NOCSPEN, I created its website and newsletter layout.

GOALS

01.

Utilize ASPEN's already established branding guidelines and create a website that is compatible to its larger counterpart yet enhance its visual identity to represent its own chapter.

02.

Create a website that resonates well with health professionals and serves its main purposes for finding the latest nutrition events and NOCSPEN newsletters.

RESEARCH

01.

Visual elements from the current website of ASPEN, the overarching organization that encompasses NOCSPEN.

Digital banner with sliding function as main visual for home page

• Boxed repeaters to reflect latest events

• Orange accents

Footer design 

02.

Branding guidelines from ASPEN

Franklin Gothic Medium

Franklin Gothic Book

03.

Elements to improve upon from previous NOCSPEN website

• Text-heavy homepage with several hyperlinks that could be better represented as buttons

• Minimal hierarchy of text and content

• Fonts and colors that are inconsistent with branding guidelines

• Difficult to understand what NOCSPEN does and offers.

• Misleading "about" page that jumps into talking about current board members.

• Lack of relevant pictures used

• Overuse of hyperlinks

• Varying font sizes

• Unattractive use of white space

WEBSITE REDESIGN

Homepage

Main image with slider function when an event needs to be featured.

Explanation of ASPEN vs. NOCSPEN to clarify specific role of local chapter.

Repeaters to showcase NOCSPEN's main features.

Check out the full NOCSPEN website here.

NEWSLETTER LAYOUT

NOCSPEN's quarterly newsletter is a new project that we onboarded starting January 2019. Our vision was to email out a newsletter to NOCSPEN members and affiliated Northern California non-members to help professionals navigate through upcoming events and stay updated on the latest news. Keeping the design limitations of the email generating website in mind, my goal was to create a newsletter that would be easily comprehensible and consistent with our NOCSPEN brand.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

Throughout the process of redesigning NOCSPEN's website, I learned about the importance of having set visual elements that are versatile and easily adaptable to any page. There were occasions when certain elements I had used for the homepage did not work well for another page — say, for example the events page — because of their different functional purposes. This taught me the importance of thinking about a website as a whole rather than a collection of individual pages.

With the quarterly newsletter, I was faced with the challenge of not having an intuitive design interface that would allow me to organize, design, and edit freely as I am used to with Adobe Illustrator. With limited functions of only being able to add text boxes and choosing font sizes, I learned how to adjust spacing, alignment, and the order of information for readability and comprehension purposes. For the next newsletter, I hope to be incorporating more visuals or images, and I will continue to work on the layout design to optimize it for our readers.