A couple of weeks ago, I was chatting to a PhD student who is looking at getting a job in the financial services sector when he graduates in a couple of years’ time.  Now is a great time to start networking, making contacts, learning about what’s going on in the industry and making yourself known to people that could help you get a job when you graduate.

This PhD student attended a conference in California last week and, in order to kick-start the job hunt, I suggested that he get some business cards to pass around and a website to give himself an online presence and a point of contact.

As my pro bono schedule is on hold at the moment due to a spate of 10 hour days, I made an exception to take this one on as, apart from the fact that the said PhD student, Christopher Dancel, is my youngest brother, I took it as a challenge to design for an individual that wasn’t directly selling a product or service and/or that wasn’t a creative professional.

The brief

As I’m not au fait with all the science content and we didn’t have time to go through it all before he had to leave, we decided a one column layout would suffice for now; I set him up with Amaya and Filezilla so that he could finish writing the content on the plane or in his hotel and simply upload it himself when he was done.

As Christopher will still be using it as a point of reference for his research with his academic peers, it needed to fit alongside academic themed websites (e.g. websites of super traditional universities), while presenting a professional image for potential employers.

Brainstorm

So ultimately, Christopher wants to get a job in the financial services industry.  I got online and looked at the websites of the type of company for which he wants to interview.

PricewaterhouseCoopers UK




UBS Warburg




McKinsey




Deloitte






Barclays




There are many design features that these sites have in common.  The layouts are clean and very functional – almost no-nonsense - with the navigation placed at the top.  They are square, eschewing the rounded corners favoured by their Web 2.0 counterparts, and for the most part, favour the colour blue.

Networking

Christopher is not a huge fan of social networking (don’t worry, I’m working on that one) and integrating many social media functions can do a disservice to someone that has neither the time nor the inclination to keep them updated.  But I persuaded him on the benefits of joining LinkedIn.  Working for a financial services company and having been on the tail end of some great job offers via LinkedIn myself, it’s a great way of putting yourself on the radar of recruitment consultants that are increasingly using LinkedIn as a source of talent.

Christopher is at Imperial College London.  Heavy on the sciences, many of its alumni go into the financial services sector, so adding a link in the footer flags this for anyone for whom this is important.

Design

When asked for his thoughts on a logo, Christopher’s only instruction was, “Just do something plain and simple.”  So I went for a simple type based logo header.  



Although I went through a few variations for his name, including my favourite, Helvetica Neu, I opted for News Gothic because it has a little more personality than Arial or Frutiger without being too self-conscious (yes, I do think fonts have personalities!).  The strapline – PhD Candidate 2012 – is Rockwell as a nod to all things collegiate and varsity.

Christopher’s main research interest is around the movement of the ocean and its affects on climate change. Although I had anticipated that the main colour on the site would be blue I was inspired by the blue-green colour in this photo that he took near Espegrend outside Bergen in Norway during summer school there this year.  It has a lot more energy than a plain navy or Facebook blue.




I added a blue-green active state to the buttons that appears when you click them, just to add a little more interest to the grey hover.

The overall design is fresh and clean.  I’m sure it will continue to be a work in progress for both of us.  When Christopher gets back I’m looking forward to creating a proper resume layout for his ‘About’ page.

The branding has been carried over to his business cards (thanks to moo.com for getting those out in time!).