The before & after.
Home page
Before
After
About Us page
Before
After
The colors came from the Fox
There was no brand design to work from. One logo, no palette, no type, no rules. So I went where the answer already lives. The Suzis celebrate Atlanta theatre, and I found inspiration in a photo of the Fox Theatre Marquee Club. I pulled the palette straight out of a photo of it. Marquee gold on deep house-light blue, deco line work, type that belongs on a playbill.
Nobody has to be told what this is. You feel the house lights going down as the page loads.
The fields nobody sees
Suzi Recommend shows change with throughout the season and the nominees and winners archive grows every year. Neither of those can be a design job, because the people doing it have an awards organization to run. Custom fields for both, so adding a recommendation or a new awards year is filling in a form. The layout takes care of itself.
Subheadings were added to each of the banners and then Custom Fields were added to the page templates so the subheads can be added without touching the Header.
Nonprofit calls to action move constantly. Donate becomes sponsor becomes apply to judge becomes an invitation to the awards show, and it changes by season and sometimes by week. So the CTAs aren’t built into the pages. They’re shortcodes backed by custom fields. Update the field, and every page carrying that CTA updates with it. Drop the shortcode somewhere new and it just works.
No page editing. No moving around Elementor widgets. No accidentally deleting a section while trying to change three words.
The timeline
Twenty years of the awards organization, now it’s a timeline. Founded in 2003 in memory of Actress Suzi Bass. The Spirit of Suzi Award in 2005. Performance awards in 2006, now thirty-two categories. It isn’t decoration. It’s the statement about why this thing matters.
Why I love this work
I really like working with (and volunteering for) nonprofits. They’re usually running on volunteers, goodwill, and somebody’s cousin who knows WordPress, and they almost never get the opportunity or budget to have a professional build. The thing is nonprofits grow through donations, and like-it-or-not how they present themselves impacts their funding. It’s not just a website, it’s a tool in their fundraising arsenal. The Suzis have been doing something good for Atlanta’s professional theatre community for twenty years, this site refresh can help them continue that work.