Washington University in St. Louis hadn’t opened a new school in 100 years. The WashU Bursky School of Public Health changed that — and it needed a website ready to launch alongside it.

The school was being built in real time, shaped by a post-pandemic era and a mandate to address the conditions that determine how people live and stay healthy. The website needed to arrive fully formed: credible enough to attract inaugural faculty and students and flexible enough to grow as the institution grew.

At the same time, WashU brought significant institutional weight to the project. The visual language, the red-line navigation, the typographic system — these are established elements of a 170-year-old university’s identity. The challenge was building something that felt unmistakably WashU while carving out a distinct voice for a school that was consequentially new.

The key question was sequencing: what must a school communicate before having alumni, research, and graduates? This shaped the site architecture.

For students and faculty, the site led with mission and vision. Dean Sandro Galea’s arrival provided a framework: public health based on health-generating conditions, not just disease absence. This gave the site a solid foundation.

For the public health community and St. Louis, the site needed to show it was a serious, research-focused institution.

We designed content to serve both audiences without merging them. Academic programs, research areas, and faculty profiles had clear, navigable homes.

The navigation system orients visitors quickly. The WashU red-line header grounds the school’s identity on every page. Below, structured navigation provides access to prospective students, researchers, and the public health community. Content-heavy pages are organized for easy scanning and reading. Typography balances boldness for authority with clarity for structure, while color remains disciplined, anchored by WashU’s signature red.

The site established the school’s credibility during a period when credibility was hardest to earn: before the first class graduated, before the first major study was published, before the institution had its own history to point to. The structure built in 2024 was ready to carry the announcement of the Bursky naming gift in 2026 — a $200M commitment that became the largest in WashU’s history — and to continue growing with the school’s faculty, programs, and research as they take shape.