McGill is a diverse, vibrant and eclectic place. Our digital platforms draw different experiences together while celebrating their uniqueness.

Standardization can make content easier to organize and consume. But when we can showcase meaningful distinctions between things – and when our audience is receptive to that – we create richness and complexity in our work. Our eclectic value invites us to embrace differences and design for complexity. There are two key concepts to unpack here:

1. The diversity and vibrancy of our community is one of our great assets.

Our design choices should support using real material - real stories and photos of real people at McGill. This material will naturally be more eclectic. It can be more challenging to work with, but it's worth the effort! The reality of McGill is more interesting than perfectly consistent stock material. 

2. Eclecticism, variety, and asymmetry can make designs feel more exciting

An eclectic approach allows us to leverage (rather than fight) the natural differences in our content. This supports using real material from our community, and it also adds visual interest. Eclectic and unexpected arrangements require you to know your content well, but you're rewarded with a more memorable and sophisticated result.

In the example above, we deliberately avoided a standard grid layout. (You know, the kind where the titles and teasers align perfectly every time.) Instead, we let the titles and teasers vary in length to fit whatever the story's content was. We set a baseline that provided ample negative space, and built on it with spacing rules that were relative. This amplified differences in the content to create some controlled asymmetry. This helps our typography-driven layout feel fresh and interesting, and it makes the layout a direct representation of our varied content. 

In this example, variations in the composition and format of the photos led to a creative use of tiling and white space. This strategy helps the different (and genuinely McGill!) photos work well together, without forcing them to match exactly.