The Iowa City Downtown Arts Alliance was founded during the COVID-19 pandemic as a way for arts organizations with active community programming to collaborate and advocate for the arts in Iowa City. Representatives from each of the nine member organizations meet regularly to share challenges, successes, and best practices.
The Iowa City Downtown Arts Alliance needed to build a first-time presence online. The organization was relatively new, and was seeking to design a responsive website that would provide information about their organization. With a limited grant-funded budget, they needed to establish a foundation for their website to grow from.
Wireframing
Prototyping
Development
Project Manager
Web Designer
Webflow Developer
Figma
Webflow
Strict Budget
20 Hours
At the start of this project, the organization provided a logo and flyer as a starting point. These were the only two designed pieces of media they had, which gave me the flexibility to expand their branding.
I pulled the first three colors directly from their logo. From there, I expanded the color palette in tints and shades, adding neutrals to balance them out.
The thing that I found most compelling about their logo design was the slash of color within the “A.” I thought that repeating that shape (a parallelogram) would bring cohesiveness and dynamism to the design. I repeated this shape with the hero images and used overlays in their brand colors to create additional visual interest.
I used the expanded branding to generate high fidelity wireframes for desktop, tablet, and mobile.
I used the designs that I created in Figma as the basis from which I developed the content in Webflow. I added some additional interactivity, including scroll effects. As the user scrolls down the page, the hero headline moves to the left and adds a color fill. I also animated lines between sections that move to the left and right as the user scrolls, mimicking the motion of a curtain opening at the theatre. I love adding subtle interactive elements like this to add small, delightful moments for the user.
Note: I am waiting on the client to connect their Instagram profile to re-activate the Instagram feed section.
The website was developed and published on Webflow in early 2022. I am now working with their team to transition the site to Wordpress.
Taking this project from concept to design to development was exciting, because I got to take part in every step of establishing the organization’s online presence. It was also an opportunity create work for a large number of stakeholders and collaborate with members of my local arts community.
