NSCAD Extended Studies Website
- 6+ Years Live and Unchanged
- Hand-coded CSS in Visual Studio
- Solo Freelance Build
NSCAD Extended Studies needed a department website that would work not just at launch, but for years afterward — maintained by administrators and non-designers who would need to update it without breaking it, without a developer on call, and without the original designer available to explain decisions they couldn't follow.
This wasn't a template or a CMS build. The stylesheet was written by hand in Visual Studio, from scratch, which put the full weight of every structural decision on getting it right the first time — because the people who would inherit it wouldn't have the vocabulary to diagnose what had gone wrong if it did.
Three tensions had to be held simultaneously throughout the build. The first was flexibility for non-designers — every structural choice had to anticipate what a non-technical administrator would do to the page in two years, or five. The second was self-documenting code — the stylesheet needed to make sense to someone reading it cold, with no context, years later, so that a developer picking it up in 2027 would understand not just what the CSS was doing, but why. The third was practical needs over design instinct — weekly check-ins with the head of Extended Studies kept the work grounded in what the department actually needed, and if a choice couldn't be explained plainly, it probably wasn't the right choice.
The question every decision was tested against was the same throughout: will this hold when I'm not here? Six years of unchanged stylesheet says yes.
Longevity is a design requirement, not a bonus. Building for the person who comes after you — the administrator who doesn't know CSS, the developer who inherits the codebase without context — is a constraint that tends to make the work better, not harder, because it forces decisions to be legible rather than just functional.
The discipline of explaining work to non-designers regularly also mattered here. Presenting to the head of Extended Studies every week in plain language meant every decision had to survive that translation, and the choices that couldn't be explained simply usually turned out to be the wrong choices.
