How we designed a multi-phase digital anniversary campaign
Celebrating milestones, especially anniversaries, is a major thing. As time goes on, figuring out how to celebrate years of legacy becomes a question that warrants more thought.
The mission
Singapore Management University faced the challenge of translating its 25-year institutional journey into a cohesive, engaging digital experience that could serve as the central storytelling platform for its anniversary milestone.
Our Starting Point
To SMU, it felt worth engaging Brain Juice Collective, as the requirement extended beyond a website build. It needed strategic narrative structuring, UX clarity, and a scalable digital system that could support multiple phases of content expansion while remaining aligned with SMU’s brand and existing Drupal CMS infrastructure.
We were engaged to design and deliver a multi-phase digital platform for SMU’s 25th anniversary campaign.
The scope covered:
- Conceptualisation and development of a central landing page
- Creation of structured microsites for key impact areas (Education, Research, Engagement)
- UI/UX design aligned with SMU’s brand identity, incorporating a geometric visual language
- Responsive front-end development across devices and browsers
- Integration with SMU’s Drupal CMS environment
- QA testing across staging environments prior to launch
The engagement required coordination across strategy, design, content structuring, and technical implementation, with a strong emphasis on alignment between storytelling and system architecture.
The Brain Juice Approach
The BJC Shift
We adopted a narrative-first approach, treating the platform as a long-term digital ecosystem rather than a one-off commemorative site. This included:
- Structuring content around three core institutional pillars (Education, Research, Engagement) to simplify complex narratives
- Designing a modular UI system to support scalability across multiple future phases
- Translating SMU’s identity into a consistent geometric design language for visual cohesion and recognisability
- Prioritising Drupal integration from the earliest stages to ensure technical alignment and reduce downstream friction
- Building with expansion in mind, ensuring Phase 1 functioned as a foundation (for P2 microsites) rather than a standalone output
These decisions were made to ensure scalability and sustainability across both content and technical systems.
Our Role
What We Did
So what did we do? We broke it into two different phases: Landing Page Development and Microsite Development.
Phase 1: Landing Page Development
We developed the central entry point for SMU’s 25-year story, integrating milestones and institutional highlights into a cohesive narrative flow. The approach focused on storytelling hierarchy to ensure immediate clarity of SMU’s legacy and impact.
Phase 2: Microsite Development
We developed and created a microsite for SMU, with each section designed to reduce cognitive overload by structuring dense institutional content into clear thematic pathways while developing a consistent design system anchored in geometric visual elements aligned with SMU’s branding through UI/UX design. This ensured visual coherence across all pages while supporting future microsite expansion.
Education: Highlighted experiential learning (SMU-X), graduate outcomes, and alumni success stories
Research: Showcased faculty excellence, research rankings, and real-world applied impact
Engagement: Focused on entrepreneurship, sustainability, and community partnerships
Our impact
Keeping this On Our Radar
BJC runs our projects and programmes through our Responsible Innovation Framework: RADAr. The framework allows us to ensure we’re creating sustainable, effective solutions for partners. The framework goes like this: Reflect - how we review our activities, commitments and processes to understand who is currently affected by our actions, both negatively and positively, Anticipate - how we anticipate the potential impacts of our product and develop strategies to cope with uncertainties, Diversify - how we actively involve a diverse, broad range of voices and values through participation, deliberation, and accountability, And Adapt & Respond: How did you adjust to challenges and perspectives so we can account for the unique contributions of different communities?
Reflect: We continuously assessed UX flow, content hierarchy, and stakeholder feedback to ensure the narrative accurately represented SMU’s 25-year journey. This included reviewing how different audience segments engaged with key content pillars.
Anticipate: We anticipated challenges in consolidating and managing content among multiple institutional stakeholders, particularly regarding consistency, submission timing, and messaging alignment. These factors posed risks to both design efficiency and delivery timelines. To address this, we introduced structured content alignment touchpoints early in the process to ensure clarity before moving into execution phases.
Diversify: We integrated multiple institutional perspectives across Education, Research, and Engagement, ensuring the platform reflected a holistic representation of SMU rather than a single narrative lens.
Adapt & Respond: Feedback during design and staging phases informed iterative refinements to layout, content structure, and CMS integration. We adjusted UI flows and hierarchy to improve clarity, usability, and narrative impact.
Ripples & Results
By the end of the project, the platform created a unified and accessible narrative of SMU’s 25-year journey, allowing diverse audiences to better understand the university’s contributions across education, research, and engagement.
We were able to provide SMU with a scalable digital foundation for its anniversary campaign, enabling consistent storytelling across current and future microsites. The Drupal integration also improved internal content management efficiency.
At the end of the journey, we managed to create stronger coherence in institutional storytelling across domains, improved user navigation and content discoverability, and enhanced alignment among stakeholders on SMU’s digital narrative direction.
“Clear storytelling architecture is more powerful than content volume. The success of the project came from structuring complexity into a simple, navigable experience that could scale across multiple phases. On a broader level, the project reinforced the importance of building digital systems that are designed for evolution, not just launch moments, especially for institutional storytelling at scale.” - Marguerit Malazo, Creative Executive.
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