In December 2022, several offices of UVA partnered to put on the Jefferson Innovation Summit — a work session for select business and thought leaders. The goal was to determine the top factors in our economy that need attention to accelerate decarbonization across the economy. The participants came from a broad sampling of sectors including transportation, energy, buildings, industrial, agriculture, real estate and hospitality. They brought the knowledge and experience of corporations, non-profits, universities and governments. They shared concerns and possible solutions, and made each other’s ideas stronger.
The project entailed refreshing a website that Birch Studio built for a prior session back in 2018, modernizing the website aesthetics and back-end technology, making the website look good with varying and increasing amounts of information, and archiving the older session information while keeping it accessible.
For the Delegates page, there was a significant amount of data to enter which all needed to be formatted exactly the same. Rather than format each of the 26 entries individually, we opted to build out the site with custom data fields. That allowed us to input the data on the backend into a web-based form and have the data output standardized on the frontend. When we adjust the style, spacing or size of an element in the code, all of the elements with the same name update automatically.
As is the case with most diverse groups, the photos for each of the participants came in at varying sizes, resolutions and quality. Using photoshop, we touched up a handful of images to enhance the color and lighting, and in some cases, fill in missing backgrounds or remove extraneous details from the image. Finally, all of the images were cropped with the subject of similar size and position. These actions all helped the diverse group of people and settings come together with a unified look, ensuring the site also looked professional and complimented the caliber of the event.
The same images were also added to a carousel slider on the Home page, so as new Delegates were added to the media library, their images were usable in this additional location.
While new pages were in progress, we provided mockups on the live site, protected from the public view by password. This allowed us to work efficiently async between meetings and keep up the pace of the project.
After the summit, we created a new page called 2022 Outcomes to share the results of the event with the public. Soundcloud audio and YouTube video of the event were embedded in the site and dozens of photos were uploaded for display.
The final asset created for the outcomes was the Decarbonization Playbook – a 20-page PDF report with five essays that summarized the ideas generated from the Summit, the process that led to those ideas, and endnotes for additional reading and research.
Sponsors were UVA’s Batten Institute, Institute for Business in Society, Environmental Resilience Institute, and Miller Center. The event was funded by the Jefferson Trust.
