SisterSong: Building the Website

Wow, this summer has FLOWN by! This Ms. Foundation Fellowship has come to an end and i'm pretty pleased with how the website has turned out!

Deliverable:

So after my last site visit it was confirmed that my main deliverable would be a website for SisterSongs ongoing project, 'Trust Black Women'.

Challenges:

The biggest challenge I faced was communicating with SisterSong. After my last sight visit, most of the office was on vacation for all of July. And by the office I mean the Director of SisterSong, Monica. This played as a big road block in my development of the website because within SisterSong all roads lead to Monica. So any questions I had that I sent to the SisterSong team, were met with the response, 'Monica would know.'

So without that communication, receiving feedback and iterating upon my ideas became a challenge but I didn't let that deter me from the task! I still had a drive to make a clean, beautiful, and comprehensive website for #trustblackwomen.

Draft 1:

With this draft I was getting a feel for how I wanted to lay things out. I used Squarespace because that is how the SisterSong website was redesigned and it's easiest to keep all of their sites in one place. With that said, Squarespace only allows you to do so much within their platform. So I spent a lot of time laying things out and figuring out how to manage my vision for the website within Squarespaces limits.

Here are images of how the site looked at first:

The first 3 horizontal images reflect how the homepage originally looked, imagine yourself scrolling through the site. you would see these different sections.

The 3 horizontal images below, are some inspirational color palettes and designs that I focused on as precedents.

Feedback:

Monica really liked the cleanliness of it and how direct and straight forward navigation was within the site. Color wise, she liked the purple but she wanted it to be more militant. More hard hitting. So she suggested brown, gold, and black.

Here's where I had some confusion. When re-branding something, the brand should be representative of the organization. To me it seemed like Monica kept referring back to the Black Lives Matter Logo and not really thinking about creating a more unique brand for Trust Black Women. I didn't know if it would be rude to bring that up to her. She liked the purple but it wasn't expressing fully what she wanted... but I don't think she knows what she really wants.

Monica also wanted an image of the women of SisterSong mobilizing or marching for Trust Black Women. Months ago I had asked for images that SisterSong might have archived away, and I didn't receive anything back. So in my second draft I just used an image I had taken when I visiting during their convening in June.

Draft 2:

Here's a link to the old TrustBlackWomen website, so you can use as a comparison: http://trustblackwomen.org/.

Based off of the feedback, I went with this color palette.

I created this short motion graphic in hope of it being on the landing page of the website.

This video shows the basic navigation from landing page to home page.

This video shows the navigation to the BLM solidarity statement to the 'Our History' page and to the 'Press' page.

This video shows the ability to connect/follow TrustBlackWomen on social media.