The team was responsible for creating site standards, wireframes, and coding the project from the ground up. We worked with Wordpress, Github, and Foundations Building Blocks to put the site together.
In early 2019 I worked along with a team of 6 other designers to create a poetry archive for the Furious Flower Poetry Center. This project spanned over the course of the semester and resulted in a fully functional digital archive of the 1994 Furious Flower Poetry Conference.
View the full site here.
Above Image: Final Site Homepage
This project began with very little brand standards to jump off of. The Furious Flower Poetry Center had an established logo and leaned into black, red, and white for their color scheme, but didn’t have any typefaces or specific colors to reference, so we began by discussing how to properly brand the website for the company.
We settled on the typefaces Playfair Display for the headers and Spectral for the body copy. While we were immediately drawn to Playfair as a very legible serif font with personality to boot, we struggled to find a suitable sans serif for the body copy that would be equally legible without dragging down the passionate energy we wanted to bring into the site. We eventually landed on Spectral, deciding that a legible serif would be appropriate for the site and reference the nature of the poems as printed pieces.
Above Image: Poet Page Wireframe
Our initial plan was to set the site on a black background in order to have it stand out against the grain of traditionally white website setups. While our clients were excited for this idea, we quickly realized that, as the site would be used for educational purposes, white type on a black background would be harder to read coming from an overhead projector. We compromised these two positions in the final site by having choice pages, mostly those featuring video content rather than large pieces of text, include the black background.
Above Image: Homepage Wireframe
With the homepage, we knew we wanted to feature hero images of the poets reading from the 1994 conference, and to feature the poetry center’s mission statement prominently below that. From there, I presented the idea to feature profile images to immediately call the viewer in to investigate some of the most prominent poets further. Beyond that, we decided to highlight each of the sections from the website, progressing from the aspects that would interest the most general audience down to pages specifically designed for classroom use.
The team was responsible for creating site standards, wireframes, and coding the project from the ground up. We worked with Wordpress, Github, and Foundations Building Blocks to put the site together.