Creating positive impact during trying times

Calgary Arts Development is a non-profit, quasi-governmental arts advocacy and granting organization. For this project, they wished to highlight how they contributed to alleviating the negative impacts of COVID-19 on artists and arts organizations via distribution of funds. Our client also wished to offer detail on the broader arts advocacy work they do, including the acceleration of their equity, diversity, inclusion and accessibility journey.

The decision was made to go beyond a digitally-optimized PDF report and straight to an HTML format. This was the case with the Accountability + Impact Report of 2020, created as an interactive micro-site with accompanying printed piece.

The primary audience for the report was city council (CAD’s shareholder) and the secondary audiences included the arts sector (grantees) and partners (including other city-building entities, such as Calgary Economic Development, Tourism Calgary, educational institutions).

We created a visual experience that nestles within the overarching visual identity we’d established for CAD some years ago while offering a distinct look and feel based on the addition of shades of pink to their palette. The micro-site and printed piece both bring numbers and graphs to life in a bold, engaging way by using animation (in the case of the digital version) and artists’ imagery within graphs. Working with CAD to gather relevant content, we also drew attention to the recipients of the funds by way of photography and stories that offer readers insight into the diversity of art projects and artists that the organization serves.

From an accessibility standpoint, the micro-site took into account high contrast colour combinations and integrates a plugin that is found at the top of every page, allowing the user to set accessibility preferences.

The accompanying printed piece was used as an overview and distributed to city council and other interested parties.

All and all, this project is a good demonstration of our ability to build on an existing brand, create engaging design that is appropriate, fresh, and inclusive, and build frameworks that allow for easy, intuitive organization of varying types of information.

See more images of this project in our Work section.