The Urban Birding Festival
New Website, Non-Profit
I recently had the pleasure of designing the new website for the first annual The Urban Birding Festival, an event built to bring together birding experts, enthusiasts, and curious new birders eager to connect with birds in their natural habitats in the Chicago area.
Fresh Design with a Purpose
The new website is all about ease of navigation and beautiful aesthetics, ensuring that visitors can effortlessly learn about the festival and get involved easily. The homepage included key aspects of the festival: schedule, registration, sponsors and links to social media. Now that the festival is over, this information has been replaced with a wrap-up of the event, along with photo galleries of people and birds from the event. We’ve kept the past schedule for reference, and all of this will be refreshed for the 2025 festival.
I was thrilled with the logo, designed by J’orge Garcia, which is modern, colorful and vibrant; I used muted colors from related images J’orge created to create the color palette for the website which gives it a very lively yet calm energy.
User Experience at the Forefront
As usual, my first concern is ensuring that the audience - the people who will be using the site - have a seamless experience where the can find key information: schedules by day, registration and information about the scheduled events: time, location, and general descriptions. Special attention has been given to mobile responsiveness so that users can easily access the site from any device.
Special Challenges
This site was for a three-day festival, so the design needed to be updated soon after the fest to look fresh, while still providing key information such as the schedule, for future reference. Registration links were removed and announcement copy was replaced with photo galleries of the fest.
Key Features of the New Site
Festival Schedule: With over 50 separate events over a 3 day period, organization of this data was critical to ensure people could find what they needed easily. I organized by type (programs and outings) and then by day and time for easier reference, with a detailed event page for each which includes further details on the presenter/leader, a description of the event, detailed location (link to Google map) and registration link.
Registration - links to register for the event were displayed as a buttom on the main navigation as well as
Sponsors - Sponsors played an important role in supporting this event financially and their logos with links to their websites. were included in a separate Sponsor page.
Organizing Partners - The Urban Birding Fest was organized in collaboration with several Chicago-area birding organizations and their logos with links to their websites was included.
Photo Gallery: After the festival, I created 2 photo galleries of photos from the fest.