Web Case Studies - hello studio

USC Alumni Association: Boosting spirit and engagement

The USC Alumni Association website was facing a lot of challenges—from a rigid off-the-shelf theme to issues with design, usability, performance, and accessibility.

We gave the site a much-needed refresh, replacing the outdated theme and resolving many of those issues—while keeping the overall look and feel familiar.

We also introduced new design features that made it easy to build bold, full-screen layouts for their signature programs.

After the relaunch, the site became more vibrant and engaging. Traffic increased by 16% in the first year—driven largely by high-profile pages that used the new design tools and saw traffic double or more.

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USC Alumni homepage — A modular homepage layout offered more design options to feature content.

website hero — 100th Anniversary showed off full-size visuals, a timeline, and alumni spotlights.

USC Women's Conference — USC Women’s Conference featured a teaser video and extended speaker and session summaries in a dialog panel.

Game Watch program — Game Watch promoted this networking event, offering over 100 global meetups, using a custom Google Maps integration.

USC Scholarships: Building support for affordability and student success

When USC’s president announced an initiative to ensure that every admitted student could afford to attend, we had a challenge: To promote the importance of college affordability and convince donors to fund scholarships that would allow the university to meet this ambitious goal.

We did that by building an award-winning website and marketing campaign, telling students' stories and helping the fundraising team to distill and deliver their most effective messages.

It won a CASE silver award as one of the best higher education advancement websites of the year.

The scholarships and student support website made a clear, compelling case for donors to contribute by showing their impact on the lives of students.

making the case with numbers and visuals — The site also served as a resource for fundraisers, providing them well-organized data, stories, and videos they could share with prospective donors.

USC Publications: Elevating the university’s voice

We collaborated closely with the USC Communications team to improve their online publications. We created a more modern, spacious, readable interface for USC News, which offered better ways to incorporate images, videos, charts, pull quotes, and sidebars into stories.

The redesign was well-received by readers, leading to a sizable traffic increase. Writers and editors also embraced the platform; their stories evolved from press releases to become more engaging.

USC News traffic grew by over 400%, reaching approximately 3 million visits per year.