AIGA

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home page: AIGA.org

Description
This is the site for design professionals and serves a similar purpose to a school site. The site offers information for both design students and those already in the field as well as those who may be looking for a job. It has helpful resources and downloads for these groups and looks at many different aspects to design, both professional and educational. It posts articles and news so designers can keep up to date and informed. They also provide information on how designers might become members of AIGA, like [|RGD Ontario].

On their site they describe themselves on the about page :

AIGA, the professional association for design, stimulates thinking about design, demonstrates the value of design and empowers the success of designers at each stage of their careers. AIGA’s mission is to advance designing as a professional craft, strategic tool and vital cultural force. Founded in 1914, AIGA remains the oldest and largest professional membership organization for design, and is a nonprofit, 501(c)(3) educational institution.

Their site further goes on to list is functions (more available here )

 AIGA serves designers with five critical functions:
 * Information
 * Communication
 * Inspiration
 * Validation
 * Representation



Information Architecture & Visual Design
The site is very much like an endless sea of links to more and more information that it seems like an enormous news engine. The main sections are labeled as: inspirations, professional resources, education, design & business, society & environment and writing. There are two sets of navigation at the top of the page, however. There is about, membership, events, competitions, news, jobs & community and a login option above the other set of navigation in the larger type. When you are in a particular section that section is highlighted in the navigation in red, such as below, the about section is being viewed. I'm not sure the divide between these is that clear but the positioning seems to work. The titles are fairly vague to encompass the large volumes of information the site has to include.



The visual design of the site is very similar to the now standard format of most sites. It includes main navigation at the top with the logo on the top left. There is also the common banner that changes with each section to show another piece of design work, likely from members of the organization since this is a designer's site. On the main page, above the fold, there is the most recent news or articles in one sections. All the sections are headed as shown below with a grey bar and the section title at the top. This site is more about information really than visuals. There are some images used as icons in each section of the main navigation. When the user visits these sections you can see below, the integration of images:





Generally the content is grouped in these boxes. At times the sidebar will include a banner for a particular project or a featured video as shown above. For each section there is a sidebar shown in the following section that gives a brief overview of what happens in that section, which is also shown in greater detail in the next section.

Usability
The site is fairly text heavy. All the type is legible but the formatting is such that you tend to ignore it after a while. The images that supplement the type do not really interest you in the content, and finding something specific by simply browsing is quite difficult. There is a section on your right side that changes with the section to help the user orient his/herself, but discovering information by yourself - because of the quantity of it - proves more difficult.



Content
There is a lot of context available on the site. Each of the main sections from the main navigation seem to lead to more article type formatted information as already shown. There are galleries for work, however, information on how to get a job, comments postings by contributing designers, articles on all design subjects like typography, handbooks and guides that are downloadable for your use including some on how to get a job. There are articles on the industry and practices within the industry, job postings and search options so one might find a particular site or design studio. There is no shortage of information here. The site index, shown below, is pretty disorganized though. It's just a long list, just to give you an idea of the content though, the scroll bar on the right is quite long and that's on the 27-inch iMac.



Conclusion
Quite frankly, the site is not very much different from most sites you see today. I thought that perhaps a site for designers, by designers would be more visually interesting, particularly where general layout and format are concerned. I can see how the employed format might be easier because there is so much content involved. I don't think the content something that should be compromised because I have found very useful information on the site, but some work on the presentation of content might be useful. I didn't even notice that there was video available for quite some time after having discovered the site and even then I don't see a video archive despite the fact that everything else is constructed like an archive.

Later while exploring the Inspiration section I discovered the design archives, which are really much more interesting in format and content than the main site. It is really a site by itself, yet not really high enough in the hierarchy to be easily found which is quite disappointing. I think that perhaps the further integration of design work into the format of the current format might be worth considering. Right now the database feel does not seem to encourage use. So much of the content seems like a coupling of a small image and description, one after another. This doesn't really accurately reflect the content or seem to promote it well. Maybe it just needs a sort of visual hook at the beginning to get first time users interested in finding out more.

Here are some images of the AIGA archives :







Because there are so many images, at the bottom of the page you can actually drag any piece into your own collection for future viewing. You can also later edit and share the list with others and spread the design love.

Materials
images and links from aiga.org