Although persistence is essential to DataCite, it was time for an update. That is why we are delighted to officially announce the relaunch of our website with a new layout and design, and with it some revisions and enhancements to our messaging. Let’s go through all the updates so that you have an overview of the most important changes.
Homepage
Our homepage is our visual presence and virtual headquarters, open to our community to visit us for our latest news, relevant Member information, and useful resources. The homepage has been relaunched, redesigned to align with the DataCite Design Manual, and restructured to enhance the user experience. The main changes and additions are:
- We have created an entirely new Events section to provide information on upcoming and past events, each with individual event pages and including calendar export functionality for upcoming events. Moreover, our extensive events archive can be filtered by event type.
- All DataCite Committee Members—from the Executive Board, the Community Engagement Steering Group, the Services and Technology Steering Group, the Regional Expert Groups, and the Metadata Working Group—are now visible with a short profile.
- We have moved the DataCite Newsletter Archive from the DataCite Support pages to our homepage.
- A dedicated section for logo and badge downloads has been made available to ensure consistent brand representation for our community and partners.
Messaging
Over the last six months, we have reviewed and refined our messaging to better align with our values and those of our community. Working closely with different stakeholder groups, we have developed a narrative that reflects DataCite’s identity as “a global community that shares a common interest: to ensure that research outputs and resources are openly available and connected so that their reuse can advance knowledge across and between disciplines, now and in the future”.
We are now harmonizing this updated messaging across our teams and communication channels, ensuring consistency, building trust and credibility, and solidifying our brand identity. In the coming weeks, we look forward to sharing with you on our blog what DataCite’s new messaging means in terms of our values and services, Member and community benefits, and our strategic initiatives and funded projects.
Design Manual
The DataCite Design Manual enables our teams to maintain the uniformity and efficiency of our brand identity. The Design Manual was revised to incorporate the updated messaging, as well as undergoing several other changes to reflect the messaging:
- The DataCite Community badge family has been expanded to include a Supporting Member badge (formerly known as Member Only). We have also updated the Consortium Organization badge, giving it a square shape to make it more distinctive.
- Visible in almost all of our communications, we have updated our primary logo in alignment with our new messaging. What seems to be the change of just one word is a pivotal statement of what our vision represents.
Please review the new design manual and contact us if you have any questions.
How all the changes play into the new tagline of our primary logo will also be part of our next blog post about the updated messaging.
So stay tuned for more information!
