The Spaces Between
2021 Senior Show
Throughout the fall of 2019, I worked with the marketing team at the historic Folly Theater in Kansas City. Through theater visits and meetings with their team members, I developed a series of six posters for their upcoming annual jazz concert series. Working with the Folly was an amazing opportunity and a great chance to experience working with a client. This project was part of an ongoing relationship between the theater and the Kansas City Art Institute, in which all junior class students participate and compete.
Final Website Walkthrough
Process
Working with the Technology
One of our biggest priorities for the final site was a high level of interaction. Once we realized that no-clip movement was unattainable due to our own limitations, we needed another way to make the void a 3 dimensional space. We didn’t want the site to be just another scrollable page. This is when we started working with 3D modeled objects, in place of the windows. We used a site called Vectary to design and host the 3D objects, and integrated code into our Ready Mag site, so that each object could be turned and played with by the viewer.
Website Decisions
We received wireframes for another team in the class with general page structures and organization for the site. This included a landing page, class list page, profiles, projects, project by category page, store page, and a page for us to put random media. We then presented different kinds of 3D objects to the class and how we could use them. We knew we wanted to use the objects to represent projects, but we also wanted each designer to have their own object to represent them on our class list page. Keeping in mind the heaviness of the objects on each page, the class decided to each choose a glyph to represent themselves, and a low-poly style object to represent each of their five projects.
Building out the Site
During the final stages of making decisions, we solidified page layouts based on what we had received from our peers but also ease of building. We knew this was going to be a monster of a site, with all 13 designers getting 5 project pages and a profile page, on top of all the main pages. The main pages are all named after physical places on campus: Studio, Gallery, Campus Green, and Store. As far as site navigation goes, we wanted to take advantage of the virtual form and the fact that users can see the projects in whatever order they want. So you could experience the projects designer by designer, or grouped by project type. Another huge part of the brand was the reference to time of day and cyclical nature of the design practice. The background on all main pages became a huge reference to this, as the gradient changed based on the time of day you visited the site.
