UCSF Head and Neck Surgery

University medical sites are often visually flat and hard to navigate — especially for visitors unused to layered org charts. That was the opening challenge for UCSF Otolaryngology (Head and Neck Surgery). Striking, credible presence inside umbrella brand guidelines — photography, IA, CMS, and identity that felt clinical and human at once.

The team wanted to stand out among peer departments without breaking UCSF rules. Constrained systems work is still systems work — credibility comes from coherence, not from shouting louder than the parent brand.

Today's stack for the rebuild

Today I'd start with where patients get lost. A Maze tree test and a quick card sort would show how people actually look for care, by condition and location rather than by the org chart. That research would set the information architecture before any visual work. It would also define the content model: clinic, provider, condition, location, each with required fields, so the Drupal content types match how patients search.

The design system would be deliberately narrow. A Figma library would lock the UCSF parent styles and open only a few department-level choices, and it would map one-to-one to the CMS components. Page outlines would generate wireframes inside that component set, so even an early draft can't break the parent brand. New clinic and faculty pages would stay on-brand without a design review each time.

Claude would help rewrite clinical department copy into plain language within the guidelines. Each draft would get a readability check and a clinician's review, and every template would get an accessibility pass before launch. The aim is clarity out of institutional ambiguity, and standing out by being easier to use, not louder than the parent brand.