A Hospital-Merger Website

Boston’s medical district is home to a number of world-famous hospitals. In 1996, two of them (both Har vard teaching hospitals) decided to merge. Since I’d already built a groundbreaking (for the early Web) and award-winning website for the radiology department at one of them, the newly expanded parent organization asked me to build the “merger” site which would replace the individual sites of the two hospitals.

A Touch of History

The Web became ready for the general public in 1993. I was already an experienced print designer, and quickly switched to building websites — before most people had even heard of the Web. This was the third site I built (1996).

About the Montage

I chose the photos for the homepage montage from a large collection supplied by the client, and scanned them into digital files. In Photoshop, I silhouetted the photos (masked out backgrounds and other extraneous elements), painted the illustration components, added the type, and composited the whole thing together.

The actual homepage was larger than this snapshot, although still small by today’s standards (typical monitors were smaller in 1996). The icons with round blue backgrounds were clickable buttons. You might like to see the montage full size.

Most site maps are just boring lists, but not this one! It has comments and personality, and is the only way to find out everything that’s available on the Sanstudio site.

There were only a handful of medical sites in the world in 1996, and even fewer that I thought well-designed, so aesthetically I had to start from scratch. The feedback I got was glowing, although of course it looks like what it was: a mid-90’s website.

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Visitors to today’s medical sites are usually searching for practical information, and want a lightweight, information-rich, fast-loading homepage, not a splashy Photoshop montage such as I created. And putting a black background on a hospital home page, I realize now, might not have been the best idea from a psychological standpoint. Also, I now know CSS, JavaScript, and other technologies which I had no knowledge of — or in some cases didn’t even exist — in the 1990s. All of which is to say, if I were building the site now, I’d do it differently.

Despite all that, I’m proud of what I did; after all, criticising a Model-T Ford from 1908 because it didn’t have a hybrid engine would be silly. In the context of Web design as it existed in the 1990’s, this site was ahead of its time; it met the client’s needs, they were very complimentary about my work, and (by the standards they established for traffic, critical feedback, and so on) the site was highly successful. Its main point was to highlight the breadth of services the new combined hospital could offer, and the homepage montage helped accomplish that. (A political note: while designing the montage, I was careful to choose staff from both of the merged hospitals from the large pile of photos the client supplied.)

Overall, this was one of the most enjoyable projects I’ve worked on. The client gave me a lot of creative freedom, and encouraged me to interact with many remarkable people at the hospital — communications and computer professionals, doctors, medical researchers, and nurse practitioners. And although they contracted me primarily as a Web designer and coder, the project also employed two more of my core skills — illustration and writing. In fact, my interviews with hospital staff enabled me to write quite a bit of the general copy that became integrated with my designs:

About the website’s “About” Page

This is a reduced- size, static snapshot of one of the pages as it looked years ago. On the actual Web page, visitors could click the blue iconic buttons to go to different parts of the site.

I wrote the text on this page from scratch. For other pages, I adapted and transformed existing content from the various printed materials that the two hospitals already possessed. Conversely, some of the text that I wrote for the site ended up in other informational materials that the hospital later printed.

The Contact San page gives several ways to get in touch, including a quick text-message box. Who says a contact page can’t be fun!

The client seemed quite happy with the result, and it remained live for years as their main website, even after I left the project to work on other things. Eventually it was replaced with their current site, which I had nothing to do with.

Legal Disclaimer

This website is not affiliated with, and this page and its contents have not been endorsed nor sponsored by, the organization whose project is depicted. The only purpose of this page is to describe work I have done. It depicts a past project, and does not in any way represent the client or their services, communications, or current website.

Today’s large medical sites could no longer be built by a single person acting as designer, programmer, writer, and illustrator. The medical Web has moved on since those early days — in breadth, functionality, and the complexity of the underlying code. Of course I’m still involved in building websites, and I know a lot more now than I did then. I also feel like I played a small but useful role in the evolutionary process that lead us up to this point.

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The photographs and text within the images of the hospital Web pages are copyright by the hospital or its parent organization. The illustrations within those images, as well as the other illustrations and text on this surrounding Web page, are copyright Lawrence San.