Designing the Three Rivers Arts Festival Website
I was approached by the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust in 2010 to redesign several of their websites, including the Pittsburgh International Children’s Festival and First Night. It was the Three Rivers Arts Website which would prove to be the main attraction, however.
A mockup from the original 2010 redesign.At the time, the Arts Festival was powered by Movable Type, which just wasn’t working out for the organization. It also spread its content and events across two distinct websites, a pain to keep updated and the events site was still being powered by outdated ASP technologies.
The Cultural Trust was looking for a site that they could easily update, both in terms of content and annual branding, and that is precisely what I delivered. A WordPress-powered site with built in mobile. Sliders and custom post types were integrated (you know, back before they were cool). I also worked with their in-house developer to create a plugin, which they called Festivity, which they’ve used across a variety of their websites over the last few years.
Each year we changed and tweaked the designs a little bit, until this year, when it was time for a complete overhaul. HTML5 was here and it was time to replace the site’s old XHTML structure, which relied on feeding different templates for different devices, with a lightweight, crisp new responsive design. Working within the festival’s new branding, we came up with this little pastel beauty:
The 2013 Three Rivers Arts Festival designs.Feel free to give the live site a whirl →
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