CALM Studies is an interdisciplinary initiative at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth, founded in 2012 by religion professor Andy Fort. It brings contemplative practice and the science of human flourishing into TCU’s courses and campus life. In the spring of 2025, Associate Director Blake Hestir, whose Mind Body Ecology Institute site we’d rebuilt, asked us to redesign it with Director Mark Dennis.
The situation
A program like this grows sideways. Alongside its for-credit courses, CALM runs free weekly CALM Convos, small CALM Buddies meditation groups, CALM Circle cohorts with North Texas changemakers, and the CALM Talk podcast. New ones kept arriving while we worked, like monthly mini retreats and Touch Grass, a student-led meditation on the lawn in front of Van Cliburn Concert Hall.
Mark and Blake wanted the site to feel like the community they’ve built, with students together and the natural world in view, and the four pillars of Belonging, Wisdom, Compassion and Flourishing at its center. Faculty and student leaders run the programs, so they also needed to be able to change any page themselves when a new semester starts.
A site that looks like the community
We started from the look we’d built for Mind Body Ecology Institute, which Mark and Blake already knew well, and pushed it brighter to sit closer to the palette Roxo, TCU’s student-run agency, made for CALM’s social campaign. Every page opens on a full-width nature photo with a bold serif headline over it: a mountain trail at sunrise on the homepage, a redbud in bloom on About.
Inside, the photography belongs to CALM. Program cards show students meditating on the grass and a CALM Circle cohort lined up for a group photo, so a first-year student can see who they’d be sitting with.
Room for every program
We rebuilt the navigation around two menus, About Us and Our Programs, with Events and Resources beside them and Donate as a button on the right. Each core program has its own page, and the newer ones share an Additional Programs page, so mini retreats and Touch Grass have a home without crowding the menu. Faculty and student leader bios open as pop-ups, which keeps a long roster easy to scan.
Resources gathers the podcasts, books, videos and exercises the program assigns onto one page. Late in the build, Blake asked for a single page where every program sits side by side, so we added Explore Our Programs as a simple list he fills in himself. It’s where the homepage’s main button leads.
Updates from the program itself
Mark wanted CALM’s community updates to go out under the program’s own name. We set up Squarespace Email Campaigns on the new site, so the mailing list and the newsletters live in the same account as the pages, and walked Mark and Blake through it on a call.
The outcome
The new site went live on tcucalmstudies.org in the fall of 2025. Since then the Our Programs menu has grown to seven entries, with CALM Creative among the newest.