Working at the American Institutes for Research gave me the chance to contribute to projects that actually mattered beyond the screen. The work centered on building and designing web presences for federally funded initiatives, including Find Youth Info, the State Training and Technical Assistance Center, and The Center on Great Teachers and Leaders. Each site served a distinct audience, from policymakers and educators to youth-serving organizations, and getting that right required as much strategic thinking as it did design and development work.
It was also my deepest early dive into Drupal, working on everything from straightforward sites to large-scale builds with thousands of pages.
Technical Approach / Challenges
The range of projects at AIR meant that no two builds were the same. Some sites were relatively contained, maybe fifteen to twenty pages, with a clear structure and a focused audience. Others were sprawling, content-heavy platforms that required careful information architecture, scalable theming, and a lot of coordination to keep consistent across hundreds or thousands of pages.
All of the sites ran on Drupal, and a big part of my role was building and maintaining custom themes tailored to each project. That meant working within each site’s branding requirements while also making sure the front-end held up across different content types, user roles, and device sizes. The federal funding behind these projects also meant adhering to accessibility standards and government web guidelines, which added another layer of care to every build.
Balancing multiple active projects at once, each with its own stakeholders, timelines, and design direction, pushed me to get organized and develop a more disciplined workflow early in my career.
Tech Stack / Project Approach
- CMS: Drupal with custom theme development
- Front-end: HTML, CSS, JavaScript
- Scope: UI/UX design, branding, wireframing, and responsive front-end development
- Workflow: Multi-project environment supporting several federally funded initiatives simultaneously
- Compliance: Section 508 accessibility standards and federal web guidelines
Key Results / Takeaways
Getting to work on federally funded education and youth-focused initiatives was a meaningful experience. These weren’t vanity sites; they were tools that real people used to find resources, access programs, and do their jobs. That context made the work feel grounded in a way that stuck with me.
From a craft standpoint, AIR solidified my Drupal skills and gave me real experience scaling front-end work across large, complex sites. It also sharpened my eye for UI/UX consistency, since maintaining a coherent experience across a site with thousands of pages requires a level of discipline that smaller builds don’t always demand.
It was also an early lesson in context-switching, managing multiple projects simultaneously with different stakeholders and design requirements, which is something I’ve leaned on throughout my career since.