About the client
Begun in 1914, Cornish College of the Arts offers Bachelor of Fine Arts degrees in the performing and visual arts and a Bachelor of Music degree, along with year-round public programs and extension courses. The College’s founder Nellie Cornish, and the many teaching artists who have followed her, believed in education through exposure to all of the arts, and this approach continues to inform the College’s curricula and community involvement today.
Black Antelope’s task was to focus on the re-design of Cornish’ non-academic programs, starting with the smaller Summer@Cornish extension before applying the same design language to the much larger Cornish+ endeavour. Both new projects would need to be fully responsive with significant restructuring and planning for key sections of the site to adapt it for e-commerce and purchasing of student courses, event tickets and more.
Start small, aim big
While we initially started design on the much smaller Summer@Cornish section, the decision was made early on to focus on a design language that allowed Summer@ to fit comfortably within the parent Cornish website branding, but also be open to expansion for larger sections such as Cornish+. We started with creating logo mockups extending the Cornish logo for the Summer@ department, followed by website designs that were primarily focused on category and homepage/landing hub pages to showcase core areas of interest, which would eventually be adapted into top-level pages for Cornish+ which then expanded on the design structure to incorporate extensive e-commerce and search functionalities.
The aim was to incorporate existing color schemes and patterns from Cornish, but adapt and improve upon them for the new look and feel of Summer@Cornish. Lots of asymmetric design and thought went into the distinct look of the Cornish site, to give it as much individuality as the college itself offers.
Additional colors and textures complimenting the existing scheme were introduced, and elevating the use of the patterns by associating them with individual categories to make each program feel unique yet still within the brand scheme of the global website.
Cornish+ in motion
Moving onto the larger Cornish+ component of the project, we discovered that Cornish had a rich amount of footage from their existing branding and social presence, and suggested incorporating video loops in the background of hero banners for the homepage and key landing hub pages across the site. We were required to demonstrate how these video hero panels might work, which was challenging at the time (while using Figma for design and prototyping in recent projects, we were using Sketch and InVision for client approval for Cornish which had limited means of showing video in the prototypes, though by adding plugins and screen recording through Quicktime we were able to show the benefit for a looping intro video for Cornish+ on the homepage and certain landing pages. As a result we were further tasked with editing together these high impact video loops ourselves to show potential students the location and tease a wide variety of programs available to them.
E-commerce and cross-promotion
Much of the content for Cornish+ and the programs were not interlinked so there was a disconnect across related programs. So seizing the opportunity for the new site, we incorporated panels for related courses, electives and a more detailed category river structure to make the journey as effortless as possible to not only find any given course on the website, but to easily see related courses that might also be of interest for purchase. Categories often included teaser landing hub designs alongside the category lists and new course pages that now allowed you to showcase the course’s unique content and add it for purchasing effortlessly, with a full e-commerce checkout process designed from scratch for the client’s bespoke needs.
A new user section was also implemented, allowing the user to create new student profiles, review and update their current orders, see their upcoming courses and change all user settings.
Community-focused
An expanded Community section was designed to highlight key ways in which Cornish contributes meaningfully to the cultural vitality of its communities through partnerships, artist awards & grants, low-cost rehearsal spaces, and free events year-round:
- A residency grant to support artists and their work outside the boundaries of their genre, discipline or comfort zone, as well as highlighting existing partnership projects.
- The annual Neddy Awards - one of the most generous and longest-running awards for visual artists in the State of Washington (providing two annual gifts of $25,000, and six awards of $2,000, to artists living and working in the Puget Sound region). This needed careful consideration due to the volume of content related to the award that had to be displayed on only one or two pages.
Website is outstanding. I’ve already gotten a ton of positive feedback. It’s rare to find a team that is as humble yet as competent as this team. I enjoyed my interactions with all of the team members of Black Antelope.Kel DyllaExecutive Director, Cornish+
