The Assignment:
Website Copywriting, Website Design, and Brand Elements Packet
FOR the Eudora Welty House & Garden
Designed to…
GET more potential visitors who appreciate literature and enjoy touring historic homes and gardens
TO find the website, envision a vibrant cultural attraction their whole family would enjoy, and book a reservation for a tour
BY designing a beautiful and user-friendly web experience, electrified with SEO principles to improve search rankings, and enriched with an inviting brand tone of voice, clear calls to action, high-quality photographs, and a fresh color palette.
The cheerful palette contrasts with the brand’s previous website. Besides outdated functionality, it had a rather dark appearance from relying heavily on brown and black tones; lengthy intimidating copy; low-quality photographs; and no clear typography standards. Just the kind of issues I couldn’t wait to remedy!
The project would begin with defining the Brand Elements:
IMAGE BANK
Using my own photographs, along with site publicity images taken by Tom Beck for the Mississippi Department of Archives and History (the state department which operates the museum), and historic images available through Eudora Welty, LLC in the MDAH Eudora Welty Collection, I started with a visual image bank.
COLOR PALETTE
From there, I crafted a new brand color palette that complemented the colors most frequently encountered on the site:
- LIME GREEN for the restored, historic garden, covered with new growth
- SOFT PINK for the flowers, including Eudora Welty’s favorite, the camellia
- PALE BLUE for the highlight of the tour—the walls of Welty’s bedroom, where the Pulitzer Prize-winning author did her writing
- And yes, DARK BROWN – as an accent, for the iconic half-timbering on the author’s historic Tudor Revival home
TYPOGRAPHY
Next came the issue of typography. I chose a simple pair of typefaces available on any of the standard software products that the museum team members would be most likely to use. For a small team with no internal graphic designer and no graphics software, this was no small consideration.
Baskerville Old Face became the print serif, chosen for its literary appearance; imagine the title page of any book, and you might envision a typeface much like this one. For the san-serif, we chose Calibri, using it in all caps as subheadings and in sentence case for body copy.
BRAND MESSAGING
Once the image bank, color palette, and typography were established, I moved on to brand messaging. I developed a tone of voice, a phrase bank, and messaging for the unique audience segments for the museum and the garden.
WEBSITE WIREFRAME, WEBSITE WRITING, & WEBSITE DESIGN
Only after these elements were in place, did I move to website creation. First came the wireframe and proposed navigation, which centers on an easy user experience.
Next, I wrote each page, using the newly established brand tone of voice and audience messaging.
Finally, I moved into Photoshop where I created a custom design, inserting the copy, photographs, and visual elements. The Eudora Welty House & Garden then contracted a web design company to build the design into a live site.