This site was a straight-forward redesign, taking visual elements used in the rest of the marketing (banner, stars, wiggly lines, the deep shade of red) and applying them to a clean design. This job was a bit of a rescue job -- the hired designer was building something that was based on PhotoShop and tables, creating a home page that was almost 200KB alone. It was also garish, not particularly usable, and required 1024 pixels to see (do people really surf full-screen?).
So rather than re-invent the wheel, I used the great visuals supplied and did a mostly table-less design. All the visuals are in the style sheet, so the students who updated the site all week didn't need much help learning how to add content.