American International College (AIC) is a private liberal arts and sciences university in Springfield, Massachusetts. The project involved custom Drupal theming for the university's website, completed while consulting with Eastern Standard, a Philadelphia-based digital agency that specialized in Drupal-based builds for higher education clients.
Drupal was the content management platform of choice for many university websites of this era, providing the content type and taxonomy flexibility needed to manage the wide variety of content a higher education institution maintains — academic programs, faculty directories, news, events, admissions information, and departmental pages. The theming work focused on translating AIC's brand identity into a functional Drupal front end, including typography, color, layout structure, and navigation patterns appropriate for a university audience.
The engagement with Eastern Standard followed a consulting model in which theming and front-end development work was contributed within the agency's established project team. Design direction came from the agency's creative team, and the development work was responsible for translating those designs into Drupal-compatible templates, regions, and block layouts that integrated correctly with the site's content types and views.
University websites carry specific requirements around information architecture and accessibility — students, prospective applicants, faculty, and administrative users all need to be able to navigate to relevant information efficiently. The theming work addressed these requirements while maintaining the visual consistency expected of an institutional web presence.
