Product

Product

Register

brand

Users

Faculty, postdocs, fellow grad students, collaborators, and future employers/committees who land here from an email signature, a talk slide, or a Google search. They visit briefly, usually on a desktop in an office, to answer: who is Charlie, what does he work on, and is there anything to read? Secondary audience: soft-matter students who find the blog or research pages.

Product Purpose

Personal academic site for Charlie Burton, second-year Physics PhD student at Northwestern (Driscoll Lab), working on shear thickening and dense suspensions. The site presents his research identity: bio, research projects, publications, CV, and an informal blog. Success = a visitor leaves in under a minute with an accurate, credible picture of his work and a way to contact him.

Brand Personality

Clean, modern, confident. The site of a serious young scientist — polished and current without being flashy. Institutional anchor: Northwestern purple (#4E2A84) as the single brand color. Voice is first-person and direct.

Anti-references

  • The default academic-pages / Minimal Mistakes template look (sidebar author profile, dense grey utility styling) — the site must not read as an unmodified template.
  • SaaS landing-page grammar: hero metrics, gradient text, icon-card grids, uppercase tracked eyebrow labels over every section.
  • Cream/beige “editorial magazine” affectation — this is a physics site, not a lifestyle publication.

Design Principles

  1. One accent, used deliberately. Northwestern purple appears where it means something (links, the site’s frame, key actions) — never as scattered decoration.
  2. Typography does the work. Hierarchy comes from committed size/weight contrast, not from boxes, badges, and labels.
  3. A visitor’s first fold answers everything. Name, affiliation, research area, and contact are reachable without scrolling.
  4. Real content only. No template placeholder entries, no fake publications, no “coming soon” filler beyond what’s honest.
  5. Fast and quiet. Static, light, minimal motion; nothing that competes with the content.

Accessibility & Inclusion

WCAG 2.1 AA. Body text ≥ 4.5:1 contrast; interactive targets clearly focusable; prefers-reduced-motion respected for any animation; semantic headings in order.