The Yale School of Art offers rigorous MFA programs in graphic design, painting, printmaking, photography, and sculpture. In 2025, Other Means was brought on to design and build a new website for the school, reconsidering how it could serve the institution while reflecting its day-to-day life.
Back to School
While the school, with its buildings, classrooms, and programs, is relatively fixed, it becomes increasingly “lived in” each year and is made anew for an incoming cohort of students.
Lectures are attended, leaving behind empty rooms once they’re finished; bulletin boards are populated with posters and flyers, which are later taken down when they are no longer relevant; personal items get left behind and then are found; gallery walls collect small holes which are filled during the summer months.
The legacies and lessons of faculty members, visiting artists, and alumni stick around long after they are gone.
While the school, with its buildings, classrooms, and programs, is relatively fixed, it becomes increasingly “lived in” each year and is made anew for an incoming cohort of students.
Lectures are attended, leaving behind empty rooms once they’re finished; bulletin boards are populated with posters and flyers, which are later taken down when they are no longer relevant; personal items get left behind and then are found; gallery walls collect small holes which are filled during the summer months.
The legacies and lessons of faculty members, visiting artists, and alumni stick around long after they are gone.
While the school, with its buildings, classrooms, and programs, is relatively fixed, it becomes increasingly “lived in” each year and is made anew for an incoming cohort of students.
Lectures are attended, leaving behind empty rooms once they’re finished; bulletin boards are populated with posters and flyers, which are later taken down when they are no longer relevant; personal items get left behind and then are found; gallery walls collect small holes which are filled during the summer months.
The legacies and lessons of faculty members, visiting artists, and alumni stick around long after they are gone.
The Yale School of Art’s website was designed and developed to present unchanging information with clarity, while allowing ephemeral announcements to appear and disappear as time goes by.
“Timeless” feed, set in Yale’s typeface
“Timely” feed, set in Univers
Information about the school, its history, programs, application process, faculty, and staff is presented in a central column typeset in the university’s typeface, designed by Matthew Carter. Alongside it runs a dynamic feed of notifications and notes, including events, exhibitions, holidays, birthdays, and important announcements. The timeless channel is restrained, academic, and slower-moving, whereas the timely channel is graphic, colorful, and animated. This logic extends throughout the site.
The two channels of the Yale School of Art’s website represent an enduring institution and the constant activity of student life within it.
Ephemeral and Contextual
Notifications are ephemeral and contextual, keeping the school of art community up to date and giving prospective students a window into weekly activities. They can indicate anything from important dates and deadlines in the academic calendar to the current weather report. They include event and exhibition reminders, upcoming class times, holidays, birthdays, “Look Backs” into the school's history, and a catch-all “sticky notes” feature for random bulletins—alerting students to lost keys, construction on campus facilities, and other day-to-day updates.
Birthdays
Building Hours
Recent Content Edits
Website Embeds
Elsewhere on the site, the notifications channel is used to display exhibition documentation and embedded websites for faculty, staff, and students.
Calendar
The calendar contains every School of Art event, exhibition, lecture, and deadline. Events are filterable by category, type, department, and audience—with varying degrees of visibility dependent on whether events are accessible to the public, the broader SOA community, or just students and faculty (via the school’s login portal).
Since 1869
The History page follows its own structure, allowing nearly two centuries of the School to unfold in one continuous chronology.
CAS and Protected Content
Certain areas of the site are only accessible to faculty, members of the School of Art community, and current students with a Yale login. Wherever this content appears, it’s blurred until one is logged in.