Duke Community Template

While I was working at Duke Community Affairs our team was asked to create a template that could be used by Duke academic units to publicize their outreach to the community, including community-based work-study opportunities for students interested in working with nonprofit organizations in Durham.

Templates are reusable layouts that can be applied to blog posts, success stories, case studies, educational articles, and more. They’re useful in many ways:

• Consistency and branding: Templates ensure content looks and feels unified across pages, posts, or platforms, reinforcing brand identity.

• Efficiency: Starting from a template means you don’t reinvent the wheel each time, streamlining workflows.

• Accessibility and usability: Good templates account for readability, navigation, and accessibility from the start.

• Content quality: By removing repetitive design and layout decisions, you can focus energy on the message itself.

• Scalability: As organizations grow, templates make it easier to roll out consistent experiences.

For the Duke Community template, my goal was to create a flexible layout that could serve virtually any academic unit. To achieve this, I:

• Built modular sections that can be easily included or omitted, ensuring the template works for groups regardless of how much content they have.

• Designed content areas that accommodate varying amounts of text and images, depending on an organization’s assets.

• Created a versatile introduction section that works for units with or without logos and with or without their own websites.

• Added a sidebar to support navigation on pages with long or detailed content.

• Applied Duke’s brand colors and typography to maintain visual consistency across the university.

Below you’ll find a detailed view, with notes on the right. If the image is slow to load, just scroll down and it should appear.