Undoubtedly the largest project I have ever worked on in my life and most probably the largest one for a long time to come. I consider myself lucky to have been part of something as huge as this in my first job itself. Two years back when I was hired by PaGaLGuY as a graphic designer I had no idea that I would be working on such a huge project. To start with my daily responsibilities just involved designing graphics and book covers for an MBA Tour organized by the team. There was only one UI project going on at that time and it was the 'B-School Rankings '10' which was being done by the previous designer. After the end of the MBA Tour I was approached to design certain UI elements like Icons and stuff for a website revamp the products team was working on. I was a bit reluctant to start with as I was hired as a graphic designer and did not want to dilute my core competency. After 1 or 2 weeks of just playing around with various UI elements I was asked to design a full fledged UI with the various social networking elements that you see around in most of the websites these days. The task involved completely disintegrating the forums that was running on vBulletin and the News Blog that was running on Wordpress and integrating what would later be christened as a Live Feed. Both the forums and the blog were stripped down to the absolute essentials so that we could start afresh. For me this was a lesson on prioritization and identifying what is important and discarding what is not. This doesn't just happen overnight. You have to spend a lot of time observing how your users interact with various elements on the site. After several days of observation and you yourselves using the site the picture gets clearer and clearer but that is just the beginning. After you have identified what's important and what's not you need to spend a lot of time thinking about what to keep on the site and what to discard, what to project and what to put in the background. This is a crucial step and often requires a very bold project manager to take a lot of decisions for you. The repercussions of a wrong call taken at this time will only be felt a lot later and by that time a lot of decisions would have already been taken over that 1 wrong call. 

1. Colors, colors, colors. Do we change them or not?
Colors play a big role in brand recognition. When you are changing a website inside out there is always that concern at the back of your mind to leave some trace about the old versions of the site so that your users do not feel completely detached from your site. The initial designs I came up with were as removed from this fact as it can be. For PaGaLGuY even though the mascot (MG) has red, green, white and black colors in it the website always had a white and grey color scheme with a lot of blue for the links and the navigation bars. After the first few attempts with a green based color scheme we decided to go with a primarily black and white design. This was more like a framework to start with. Once we get the framework for most of the site right we will start adding colors and shadows and all those embellishments to make the site complete.

Note: The images shown below are just low fidelity prototypes.

After living with the last design for around 3 weeks we decided that it would be a good idea to stick with the color scheme that is closer to the existing site. Hence we decided to pick up two shades of blue #214f68 and #121c23 as the main colors for the revamped PG. 

You can see the old version of the site below

MBA News
Previously the MBA news section which is a blog of all the latest happenings in the field of MBA used to the home page of the site. A lot of other section activities like latest forum threads, comments etc were also crammed into this page there by making it a bit difficult to readable. With the re design of the MBA news section we aimed at providing the users with the best reading experience by removing all the distractions and changing the font to 'Georgia' and a decent line height.