Case Study: Cherry Creek Arts Festival Website
“Hopefully, it will become one of the biggest virtual museums in the world,” says Rob McPhee, creative director at Heinrich. “There are 255 artist pages alone.”
Cherry Creek Arts Festival Website: An Outdoor Galleria Goes Digital
Who the Client Is: The Cherry Creek Arts Festival (CCAF) is an annual, three-day Denver event and a world-class attendence and award-winning celebration of the visual, culinary and performing arts. With 350,000 visitors over three days, this signature event will celebrate its 20th anniversary in 2010.
Challenges to Overcome: 1) Embody both the spirit of a three-day event and create a hub for year-round festivals, education and outreach; 2) Facilitate logistics such as volunteer registration, artist entry and sponsor sign-up with convenience; 3) Leverage new media; 4) Offer a rare artistic experience; 5) Provide flexibility and scalability as CCAF grows from year to year.
How Heinrich Approached the Project: We wanted to fuse the static and dynamic. To do that, we knew we needed a vibrant community component; a strong backend to accommodate registration, a shopping cart and volunteer signup; and a scalable and accessible content management system. Then, each of those components needed to spill into an online experience that was peppered with design, imagination and multidimensional elements.
What Heinrich Delivered: The virtual space of a traditional museum, complete with the wood floors, white walls and individual frames of an international gallery, filled with a modern, online experience of browsing, shopping, learning, connecting, registering, posting and playing.
“Hopefully, it will become one of the biggest virtual museums in the world,” says Rob McPhee, creative director at Heinrich. “There are 255 artist pages alone.”
Rather than adding connectors like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube as the usual afterthought down the page, iMac-inspired visuals form a central, comprehensive menu of social media. Real-time digital technology allows event visitors to upload photos directly to the website.
Why the Functionality Is Such a Good Fit: Any task, whether it’s purchasing art, volunteering for parking duty or signing up to be a multilevel sponsor, can be accomplished completely online. In addition, the website can literally be redecorated on the fly. “With a superstructure and library on the backend, its flexibility is more than just updating images or changing text,” says McPhee. “We can swap out the walls, the floor and the ceiling of this website — even add people or artists.”