A new user experience for Shutterstock's Academy of creative learning.

Shut­ter­stock — the glob­al stock pho­tog­ra­phy, illus­tra­tion, and video provider — approached us to help them expand their ser­vices by design­ing the Shut­ter­stock Acad­e­my web­site. The cur­rent blog back cat­a­logue at Shut­ter­stock is vast, so our job was to devise a way that these arti­cles could be mean­ing­ful­ly chun­ked togeth­er into a series of lessons on a giv­en sub­ject. For exam­ple, if some­body want­ed to know more about ​‘How to use Pho­to­shop’, they could search for those terms, and be pre­sent­ed with a log­i­cal order of blog arti­cles pre­sent­ed as a course.

Shut­ter­stock­’s brand iden­ti­ty is well-estab­lished, so our job was to devise the struc­ture of the Acad­e­my to ensure max­i­mum usabil­i­ty and dis­cov­ery, and to apply the cur­rent brand guide­lines so that the Acad­e­my fit­ted seam­less­ly into the over­all Shut­ter­stock web­site and brand.

The result was a brand new Shut­ter­stock Acad­e­my sec­tion of the web­site, that has increased ease-of-use, allowed read­ers to take a more stream­lined approach to their learn­ing, and has helped Shut­ter­stock resur­face neglect­ed arti­cles from the back cat­a­logue. All of these results have meant increased traf­fic for Shut­ter­stock and val­ue added for the read­er, for very lit­tle effort.