CAPS Poster

explaining Stanford’s Counseling and Psychological Services

Remote Internship, Joint project with ASSU and Stanford’s Office of the Vice Provost for Student Affairs, 5 month project

Challenge

Create a poster to help Stanford students better understand the university’s Counseling and Psychological Services (CAPS).

 

Skills

  • User research and interviewing

  • Figma

  • Adobe Photoshop

  • Procreate

  • Teamwork

 

The Problem

Stanford’s CAPS (Counseling and Psychological Service) is a confidential mental health resource for students. While the services have been available for years, certain policy changes and misconceptions about CAPS have prevented many students from reaching out. And with over a year of remote learning, CAPS had to adapt its services to meet the new online format. With students returning for the 2021-22 school year, we thought it would be the perfect time to reintroduce CAPS and all of its resources in a poster that could be easily hung around campus and found online.

 

User Research

In deciding how to best to format the poster, we chose a primary audience of newer students who didn’t know much about CAPS / had never visited before. With this in mind, we talked to many different people, including students, CAPS providers, and officials within Stanford’s Student Affairs Office in order to determine how best to approach this poster.

 

Information Gathering

We mapped out all of the information we had to help us find a layout that would give the concrete information that students would want as well as convey the fluidity of the process itself.

 

With the help of Oliver Lin, a CAPS provider, we were able to create a flowchart of how CAPS operates.

 
 

Ideation

After laying out what information we wanted in the poster, I began to sketch out possible layouts. As the sole designer, I wanted to make sure that I gave my team a variety of options that we could pick and choose from depending on what we wanted to highlight about the process.

 

I tried to create designs that were fundamentally different in structure in the brainstorming phase. That way, we could decide on a basic layout and I could explore smaller details in the Figma phase.

 
 

Prototyping

We decided to move forward with a flowchart structure, and from there I rapidly prototyped different variations in Figma.

 
 
 
 
 

After passing around different options and getting feedback, we landed on the “river” version as the favorite. Because of the lack of arrows and structure, it was better able to convey the idea of fluidity in the process. So with the structure out of the way, I moved on to prototyping colors and nailing down the exact design.

With the help of feedback from users and officials, we decided on this specific layout and a teal and yellow color palette. With this now decided, I moved on to Photoshop to create a more finalized poster.

Using Stanford’s official color palette, I created many different color options for the poster.

 

In Photoshop, I continued to refine the design. My team and I worked with CAPS and other university officials to nail down the wording and order of boxes, and we gathered feedback from users to ensure that the flow was clear and easy to read. I also added graphics to make the poster feel less boxy and changed the font in order to help the poster be more readable on small screens.

Before: The smaller and narrower font makes it hard to read on small screens. White title and intro paragraph don’t have enough contrast with the background.

After: The larger and wider font makes it more readable. Adding a drop shadow to the white text also helps the words pop out more, making it easier to read.

 

Final Posters

After lots of small tweaks and many rounds of feedback, the final poster was created.

The final poster will be on the Stanford CAPS website soon.