web design & branding for the University of California

Designing for UC is different from designing for a single corporation, a startup, or a private university. The decision-making is decentralized. The brand layers are nested: system brand, campus brand, school brand, department brand, and sometimes lab brand. The accessibility requirements are stricter than baseline WCAG. The procurement processes are unique. And the audiences are extraordinarily diverse, including prospective students, current students, faculty, staff, alumni, donors, research partners, policy makers, and the public.

We’ve built our practice around these realities.

The UC system’s Electronic Information and Communication Technology (EICT) Accessibility Policy requires WCAG 2.2 AA conformance and goes beyond baseline accessibility in several areas. We design and build to WCAG 2.2 AA as our default standard, and we validate using Siteimprove and manual testing as part of every project. Accessibility isn’t a final-stage audit for us. It’s a design constraint from the first wireframe, and it’s something we train clients on so the sites stay accessible as content evolves.

UC operates under nested brand systems. The UC system itself has a brand framework. Each campus has its own brand standards built within or alongside that framework. Schools, colleges, departments, and centers then express their identity within their campus brand. Designing for any UC unit requires understanding which brand layers apply, which standards must be honored, and where there’s latitude for distinctive expression. We’ve navigated this on dozens of projects and can move quickly through the questions that often slow down agencies new to UC work.

Working with UC means working with UC procurement. We’re familiar with BearBuy and equivalent campus procurement systems, with UC’s vendor classification and onboarding processes, and with the contracting realities that affect project structure and payment terms. We’ve been a registered UC vendor since long before most agencies in our category existed.

UC websites are rarely the work of a single team. A typical engagement involves communications staff, faculty stakeholders, IT, accessibility leads, brand committee members, and sometimes external advisors. We’ve designed governance models, training programs, and CMS configurations that let UC clients manage decentralized publishing without losing brand or accessibility integrity over time. Learn more about unified branding across university departments and the impact of consolidating department sites.

Project6 builds UC websites on the two CMS platforms used most across the UC system: WordPress and Drupal. Both platforms have legitimate strengths for different UC use cases. Drupal often makes sense for larger, structured-content-heavy sites with complex permissions, which is common for medical centers, research institutes, and main campus communications. WordPress, particularly with Gutenberg, is often the right choice for departmental sites, centers, and content-marketing-driven units where editorial speed matters more than schema complexity.

We’re platform-agnostic in our recommendations and platform-expert in our delivery. Learn more about our WordPress development services and our Drupal development services.

Project6 is a recognized partner with both Acquia and Pantheon, the two managed hosting platforms used most widely across the UC system for Drupal and WordPress sites.

Acquia is the enterprise hosting and digital experience platform for Drupal, and it’s the standard hosting environment for many UC Drupal implementations including UCSF, UCLA, and other campus and medical center sites. As an Acquia partner, Project6 brings hands-on experience with Acquia Cloud, Acquia Site Studio, and the broader Acquia ecosystem. We understand the platform’s security model, deployment workflows, and content authoring tools, which means UC engagements on Acquia move faster and avoid the common platform-learning curve that delays projects with agencies new to the environment.

Pantheon is the WebOps platform of choice for many UC departmental and unit websites on both WordPress and Drupal. UC Berkeley, and numerous schools, centers, and institutes across the system run on Pantheon. As a Pantheon partner, Project6 works fluently with Pantheon’s multidev workflow, Quicksilver hooks, New Relic integration, and the platform’s content publishing pipeline. We can spin up, develop, deploy, and maintain UC sites on Pantheon without the onboarding friction that adds weeks to projects with non-partner agencies.

UC campus IT and web teams have already standardized on these platforms for good reasons: enterprise-grade security, accessibility tooling, deployment discipline, and FERPA-aware infrastructure. An agency that doesn’t know the platform adds risk and cost. An agency that’s a recognized partner removes both. When you bring Project6 into a UC engagement, your IT team doesn’t need to vet our hosting competence or budget for our learning curve on the platform. We’re already there.

Here more from our higher-ed clients.

If you’re at a UC campus, school, department, research center, or program and you’re considering a website redesign, brand refresh, or digital partnership, we’d like to hear from you. We respond within one business day, and an initial conversation is the right way to find out whether we’re the right partner for your project.