Harvard — SARA HASHIM

Harvard Graduate School of Education | Making Caring Common

Creating tools for empathy in education.

Making Caring Common (MCC) is a project of the Harvard Graduate School of Education that helps educators, parents, and communities raise children who are caring, respectful and responsible toward others and their communities. As part of this initiative, MCC publishes reports and resources for educators, administrators, and parents, related to building empathy and equity in early childhood through college admissions.

As they continued to build out their resource library with a new set of 15 reports being published, they needed to develop a holistic understanding of what was needed and evolve their design system so that this new library of material would have a thoughtful, consistent, elevated look and feel.

The Challenge

We began by doing a deep audit of the content to identify what the toolkit would need to solve for. We created schematics for reports that allow us to have a zoomed out look at what the parts were before we dove into the design exercise. We also needed to account for the fact that these reports would be used in both digital and physical spaces and though we wanted designs that were impactful and striking, we also wanted to provide flexibility to allow for sustainable choices. On the design side there were wayfinding and consistency needs between reports, image guidance, typographic hierarchy that needed to be developed and some adherence to the Harvard brand guidelines that needed to be accounted for.

This timely and much needed content was text heavy and the danger was that page after page of text would cause the reader to lose attention. Through our design exploration we created systems to allow the information to breathe in order to be absorbed and be most useful. We used type, scale, color and imagery to create moments where human voices, empathy and intention drove the design. And we allowed ourselves the mechanisms to zoom out frequently to make sure each report in the series was working harmoniously with the content around it.

The Solution

The resulting series of reports, toolkits and style guide was a system that took inspiration from the Harvard master brand but created a unique space within it for this important initiative to thrive. The system was flexible, addressed the complexity of speaking to many different audiences and had clear way finding that allowed the reader to clearly understand where they were in the series of toolkits. The team tasked with carrying the work forward had a strong foundation on which to build future reports to come.