
Bloomberg Center for Cities
Building the brand infrastructure and website to support the leaders making a brighter future for cities.
Work
News website Penn Today launched in 2018 to uplift stories about the people and innovations across the University of Pennsylvania’s 12 schools.
Over the years, faculty and staff came to rely upon the site and its newsletters to discover groundbreaking work and potential cross-disciplinary collaborations.
But by 2024, the site trailed behind the latest storytelling trends, and the staff had become less certain about the target audience.
Penn Today asked Teal to conduct a research phase to identify primary audiences and their news habits. Concurrently, Teal benchmarked Penn Today against its Ivy League peers and world-class news outlets’ sites and newsletters to inform a comprehensive redesign.
The project kicked off with deep-dive interviews with all staff departments to understand the history and internal aspirations for the site and newsletters. Audience interviews and an online survey revealed users’ impressions of the current site and their news consumption habits.
Performance analyses of the website and newsletters, plus A/B testing of the newsletter, uncovered trends in reader interactions.
Market benchmarking research explored content strategies and designs to inspire Penn Today’s new look.
Penn Today publishes a mix of feature stories and breaking news five days a week.
Teal designed a fully customizable homepage to support formats including long-form profiles, compelling photography, video coverage, upcoming events, action alerts, and university-wide announcements. The homepage can be instantly reconfigured to best display the day’s news.
Article pages are equally flexible to accentuate Penn Today’s written and visual reporting. Because interview after interview praised the campus photography, Teal designed multiple image options, from full-width single shots to slideshows and galleries.
Penn Today had also started producing long-running series on topics such as artificial intelligence, but the current site didn’t support these collections. The new design makes it easy to create a magazine-style treatment for multiple articles on trending themes.
The information architecture reorganized the site’s complex structure into an easy-to-use site navigation. It captured the wide-ranging, ever-changing coverage into major focus areas, with entry points for trending topics. It also introduced wayfinding to content grouped by school.
The website offers two theme options for article detail pages: a light background option and a dark background with reversed-out text. Admins can easily select their preferred theme directly within the CMS. This selection triggers automatic updates to page components, ensuring text, colors, button styles, and imagery adapt seamlessly to each background.
Audiences told us that they rely on Penn Today’s daily and weekly newsletters to keep up to date with the university. The old design was repetitive, with every article featuring a photo and teaser text of the same size. They could also be quite long, with an average of 25 stories per email.
Teal introduced a broader range of components to enhance variety while incorporating best practices for content length and mix.
Building the brand infrastructure and website to support the leaders making a brighter future for cities.
The part where we ask you to cough up your email. So we can discuss all the amazing things we’re gonna do together. No pressure. Really.