Academy of Social Sciences teams up with Praline design agency to revamp its website and visual identity

January 2021 marked the beginning of an ambitious journey to rethink the Academy’s visual identity and to create a new website. By the end of September this mission had been accomplished after many months of collaboration with a talented team of creatives at the design agency, Praline.

The drivers behind this project were to modernise the Academy’s image and the way the Academy engages with its Fellows and the outside world, and to ensure its relevance and appeal to future generations of social scientists. Other important aims were to unify our Campaign for Social Science with the Academy’s main brand and make it easier for our website visitors to understand our work and find the information they are looking for.

With Praline’s support we set out to design a new website, as our key communication tool, to  enable us to better showcase the social sciences and communicate why and how they are critical in understanding the contemporary human world.  We wanted the new website to be a pleasant and stimulating experience for users, encouraging their curiosity to spend time exploring more.

As well as attempting to achieve this by prioritising clear navigation and a clean attractive design, we introduced new sections that bring our policy work together in one place, that portray our Campaign activities well, and that demonstrate our role at the heart of the social sciences.  For example,  ‘What is Social Science?’ enables us to curate and publish case studies on real world impact and highlight community projects on equality, diversity and inclusion. This new section also includes content on ‘Careers in Social Science,’ which in addition to providing key statistics and information about social science disciplines, skills and sectors, includes career profiles of social scientists working as practitioners or in academia. The web content is work in progress and we will build an archive of profiles over time reflecting the full breadth of social sciences disciplines and expertise.

The new Fellows pages have been designed practically to enable anyone seeking social science expertise to easily find and access information on our Fellows in the Directory and for our Fellows to access the essential membership information they need. In this section we have also tried to incorporate Fellows’ profiles and voices by featuring brief testimonies in their own words on why social sciences matter and the significance of becoming a member of our Fellow community.

These are just some examples of the new additions to the website and we hope you will take some time to visit the site and learn more.

Praline has been a pleasure to work with and has done a wonderful job. We are delighted with the outcomes of our collaboration.

Praline are implementing the official ‘design’ launch of their work with us today. Find out more on their website.