Tennyson Center for Children

The Tennyson Center is a Denver school for children who have had an extremely rough road (abuse and trauma). Work should matter. I know that design isn't huge in the great scheme of things, we're not curing cancer, but design still matters. A professional look and feel for a place such as this helps them get more funding and awareness.

Home

Goal

First impressions matter. Present Tennyson Center as the team of dedicated professionals and experts they are.

Approach

  • Warm, muted color palette.
  • Highest quality photos. Due to the nature of the project, real kids could not be used as art, but we also didn't want to use the fake-happy typical stock kids. So we worked hard to find realistic expressions and kids at play—staying away from faces as much as we could. Obviously, there are exceptions (and eyes matter), but for the most part, showing kids in action was just as powerful.
  • The handwritten font on the home page helps make the website feel a little more organic and friendly.
Donate

Goal

People are the lifeblood of non-profits, but donations help keep the lights on.

Approach

  • As with most non-profits, subscriptions are the key. We made the 'donate' button as obvious as possible. In an ideal world, it would be a form on the page itself (currently, it's in a popup), but the donation system wasn't something we had a lot of control over. It's the best solution for a realistic problem—not every client has the budget and time to do a custom donation system.
Nav

Goal

Navigation is the part of the website you touch the most.

Approach

  • Standard web navs aren't awesome. This nav allows us to weight different sections based on their importance and give the user visual cues which help them to understand where they currently are in the site (the heroes match the big tiles).
  • It also translates quite well to mobile, which is 50%+ of our traffic.
Programs

Goal

Highlight certain programs more than others.

Approach

  • Programs is one of the more important aspects of the site. Within the page itself we can order and weight the programs to draw attention to the programs we want to focus on. It's a big change over a more common method which gives the same relevance to every program.