Website & Design
Dance Kaleidoscope
Account Manager
Lori Byrd
Key Team Members
Logan Acton
Jarred Juett
A dance company needed a fresh website to celebrate a vibrant legacy while signaling the opening of a new chapter.
Situation
Dance Kaleidoscope — an Indianapolis-based contemporary dance company — was experiencing a significant shift in leadership as their longtime visionary artistic director was retiring. Updating the look and feel better communicated their past and future as a leading cultural organization working at the highest caliber of excellence.
The site design, architecture, and layout challenged the user experience and the aesthetic fell short of reflecting the organization’s brand.
Findings
The existing design lacked the consistency and intentionality necessary to communicate the company’s professionalism. While each dance performance was promoted with a visual presence in line with its dramatic content, the overall identity had not yet been implemented in a way that represented the brand values determined through our discovery process with the team.
Design updates and practical tool selections addressed all of the needs required to bring the website up to the standards it deserved.
Solutions
- Updated typefaces for a bolder use of text and images while applying color meaningfully to organize information blocks.
- Researched, implemented, and customized new tools within the website to organize events, an integral piece of content.
- Developed a visual system that unified each dance season while giving each a unique presence, all of which portrayed the excitement of the performances.
- Adapted the needs of design to easily translate from digital to print, or vice versa.
It can be a challenge to visually honor the past while looking to the future, but creative design decisions can lead to a vibrant outcome.
Considerations
- This nonprofit team was consistently stretched across responsibilities and time, requiring simple tool integrations and backend updates.
- In spite of being a small organization, the website had to maintain a robust calendar, ticketing, and donation to meet all of its goals.
- A new era for the dance company meant creatively combining the brand equity in the existing logo with an exciting look and feel that represents the future.
The simultaneous updates to user experience and brand resulted in a refreshed, energetic website that foregrounded their cultural vision and reputation of excellence.
Wins
We developed a sustainable system that could easily grow with the client as their company added new dancers, promoted new seasons, and pursued new initiatives. The resulting web experience puts users and functionality at the heart of design decisions while evoking the dynamic sophistication of the brand. The updated homepage and menu structure streamlined the path to event ticket purchases and donations — the two primary calls to action.