• Work

    American Folklore Society

    Streamlining content organization and refreshing the brand and website for engagement with a broader audience

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Partial screenshots of the American Folklore Society homepage design

Goals

After years of active content creation, the AFS website was ready to give its audiences an easier way to find information on their website along with a visual brand that clearly represented its membership.

  • updating the visual identity to reflect the vibrancy and passion of both the organization and its membership while maintaining a connection to its past
  • optimizing content organization for easier website navigation
  • improving content presentation for higher audience engagement
  • building an accessible and inclusive experience for all website visitors
  • Strategic Discovery
  • Information architecture & UX
  • Content Strategy
  • Branding design
  • Web design
  • WordPress & front-end web development
  • Accessibility compliance & consulting

Project team

Modern tools for convening those who honour and study cultural traditions

The American Folklore Society is a membership organization dedicated to supporting the individuals and organizations engaged in the study and advancement of folklore and expressive cultural traditions worldwide. AFS serves its members and the general public by providing programming, publications, policies, and resources examining and affirming the diversity of human creativity across time, heritages, and places.

When an organization is productive and serves a wide membership base, its website often becomes a place where its content is meant to be helpful but ends up being lost without appropriate organization. AFS came to us to make sense of it all and make it easy to navigate while engaging a wider audience through a redesign of its visual brand and website to match its vibrancy and warmth.

Membership organization’s work, ready for the public to explore

We started by diving head-first into AFS’ world by facilitating a brand workshop and learning about the staff, board, and membership views of where the organizations should go to serve them best. We used our findings to formulate a new positioning document encompassing mission, vision, brand values, audience characteristics, and messaging approaches. Then we moved on to designing a new visual brand that creates a connection between logos the organization used in the past and allows for easy extension to various groups and sections within AFS.c

With the branding and visual identity finalized, we directed our attention to making sense of all the content on their website and organizing it for ease of discovery and navigation. Finally, we created a vibrant and warm website design that intuitively leads visitors to the content of most interest to them without being overwhelming and turned it into a fully functional WordPress website that’s easy to update for the AFS communications team.

As with all of our web design projects, we trained the client to use their new site and set up appropriate link redirections to make sure that we’re not missing any SEO opportunities.