National Math Festival
Background
The National Math Festival, or NMF for short, is the nation's largest math festival. Bringing together students,
educators and people of all ages for a weekend of problem solving, speakers and fun math activities. NMF
came to John McNeil Studio to create a website that would serve as a registration and information hub for
past and upcoming festivals and help build anticipation and maintain interest between festivals.
Design Challenge
The main challenge when approaching the NMF site was finding the best way to surface the many kinds of
content that the site houses and provide the user with the most useful and compelling content that would
keep them engaged with the site during the long lead-time between festivals.
Information Architecture
Process
As the National Math Fest is a bi-annual event, in addition to advertising upcoming festivals there is a lot
of additional content from math games, talks, lessons, videos, photos, and affiliated events throughout the
year that is aimed at continually engaging the user between festivals. Not only did this info need to be
organized in a user friendly way, it also had to be presented in a way that was digestible, and easy to
interact with.
We arrived at a flexible modular design on the home page or other landing pages that would serve up these
various streams of content in bit size portions and allow you to go deeper as you drilled down into their
dedicated pages.
Wireframes
Also the content that surfaced to the home page is dynamic based on defined time frames pre-festival,
during the festival, post festival, and a year out from the next festival. So that pre-festival, calls to register or
promoting events/speakers are front and center, during the festival live streams of events and daily schedules
are featured prominently, post-fest recaps, videos, photos, etc from the event were on the main page.
In displaying all that content the client had the power from the backend to rearrange the visual layout of the
modular pages based on their content needs at the time.
HI-FI Mockups
Visual direction for the site was taken from NMF's existing brand. The bright hues of the logo were used to
color code and mark location as they were mapped to pages/types of content. Photographs of past festivals
were used prominently to convey the atmosphere of the fest and mathematical patterns were used for texture,
from chalkboard equations to a parallaxing infinite star pattern that grows as you scroll down the page.
Working with the production and technical director at JMS my responsibilities were sitemapping, wireframing,
visual design and prototyping.
