campus guides & tours

The goal for this cross-media project was to provide visitors with a guide that would allow them to navigate and learn about Lehigh’s beautiful campus(es) in the absence of a tour guide.

The Campus Guide’s two main components are the printed guide and the audio guide (website). While each of these pieces can stand on its own, they are best consumed in combination, while exploring campus.

The third component is an Instagram story series, designed for those who are learning about campus remotely.

The Printed Guide

Prior this redesign, visitors were given a large, single-sheet map which showed the fastest paths to access Lehigh’s most iconic buildings. Key updates in the this reincarnation include:

ADA-accessible walking routes
easier carry-size
images showing life inside the buildings
QR codes lading to the Campus Guide’s companion audio guide

The Audio Guide

The Self-Guided Tour webpage is a student-led guide to all the stops listed in the printed piece. Each stop’s audio track includes information and anecdotes, giving listeners a glimpse into what life at Lehigh is like.

Care was taken to ensure that this site would be easy to use while walking around campus:

design was approached mobile-first.
stops are arranged in the same order as the printed guide—and the embedded audio track includes a visual of the stop, which matches the image used in the printed piece.
to reduce load-times, audio files and images are hosted on SoundCloud.

The Social Media Tours

I conceptualised, wrote, designed and produced the Campus Tours Instagram series to introduce prospective students to Lehigh’s three beautiful campuses remotely, and to drive viewers to explore the many visit opportunities Lehigh offers.

I pitched and developed this project as a response to Lehigh’s sudden and indefinite pause on showcasing their spaces when COVID-19 safety measures were put in place in 2020.

The series’ success in 2020 has led to it being an annually recurring series—running once a week for 19 weeks, with each story featuring an iconic Lehigh space that plays an important role in undergraduate students’ time at the university.

Sample panels from week-18’s stop: Linderman Library

Notes on Process

To give viewers a strong sense of place within just a few frames, each of the 19 tour-stops was given its own story, following this structure:

Introduction: animated, showing the relative location of each tour-stop to the next, with an indication of the quickest route.
About the space’s history
How the space is used today
Closing: call to action, inviting prospective students to explore campus visit opportunities.

I wrote copy—concise and informative, with a friendly tone—in tandem with working on design, and used classical serif type to balance out the (friendly) tone.

And I selected photography based on authenticity—preferring candids and outtakes over posed photos, to show a prospective student what their life at Lehigh could truly look like.