Lee Lilly

Project Details

The Cornell University Office of Civil Rights website serves a sensitive but essential function: connecting students, faculty, and staff with information on Title IX, discrimination and harassment reporting, accessibility accommodations, and related university policies. For this project, I handled the visual design and front-end development, with a strong emphasis on clarity and trust, since many visitors arrive while navigating a difficult situation and need to find the right resource or reporting path quickly.

Given the volume of policies, procedures, and resource pages the office oversees, information architecture was central to the design, with clear top-level navigation branching into detailed subsections for topics like sexual misconduct, bias and discrimination, and accommodations. At the client’s request, I designed prominent callouts linking out to several related, similarly themed Cornell multi-sites, giving visitors an obvious path to adjacent offices and resources without requiring them to leave the current page’s context or hunt through menus.

The result is a WordPress site that balances Cornell’s institutional brand with the specific tone this content demands: calm, clear, and easy to navigate, even for visitors who may be under stress.