As the Director of Communications at Emerald Coast Writers, my volunteer position involves designing, producing, and publishing marketing materials for the organization. Over the past several months, I have been working with the board on a brand update. While the colors, fonts, and logo would remain the same for the organization, the way that information was presented online was in desperate need of a redesign.
The first part of this project was the website. The old website design used blue hues that were not part of the brand guide. Additionally, the use of fonts throughout was inconsistent and the website in general used poor graphic design principles to organize information. This can be best seen on the home page, where text is sometimes cut off by the edges of the site and large portions are left blank. To correct this, the new website was designed with the brand guide colors in mind and text was incorporated in a way that was more visually interesting in a design that is flexible for both mobile and desktop use.
This updated design can also be well-represented by the “About Us” page. To make the content more visually interesting, images and brand colors were used to break up the main sections of the page. Where before the “About Us”, “Our Mission”, “Our Vision”, and “Our Story” sections were simply typed out in paragraph format, the new design breaks each of these into their own clearly defined portions, with the “Our Story” section being even further defined through the use of a timeline.
The third page I will highlight here is the membership page, which was one of the pages in most need of a facelift. In the previous design, the prices were not clearly defined without clicking a button. To make this communication clearer, the three membership options and their prices are clearly defined at the top of the page, with the reasons explaining why joining would be beneficial being clearly laid out in a section underneath the pricing.
The website has already received high praise from the members and board of Emerald Coast Writers. Now that our website matches the brand guide for the organization, we can take the design principles established here and reuse those same graphic design principles on social media channels through the use of templates, which will be discussed in a future blog.
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